scholarly journals From periphery to the centre: Towards repositioning churches for a meaningful contribution to public health care

Author(s):  
Vhumani Magezi

The role of communities in health care has gained prominence in the last few years. Churches as community structures have been identified as instrumental in health-care delivery. Whilst it is widely acknowledged that churches provide important health services, particularly in countries where there are poorly-developed health sectors, the role of churches in health care is poorly understood and often overlooked. This article discusses some causes of this lacuna and makes suggestions for repositioning churches for a meaningful contribution to health care. Firstly, the article provides a context by reviewing literature on the church and health care. Secondly, it clarifies the nature of interventions and the competencies of churches. Thirdly, it discusses the operational meaning of church and churches for assessing health-care contributions. Fourthly, it explores the health-care models that are discerned in church and health-care literature. Fifthly, it discusses the contribution of churches within a multidisciplinary health team. Sixthly, it proposes an appropriate motivation that should drive churches to be involved in health care and the ecclesiological design that underpins such health care interventions.

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 266-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Karpf ◽  
J. Todd Ferguson ◽  
Robin Y. Swift

Health care is in crisis at the global, national, and local levels, with hundreds of millions living without basic care, or with insufficient care. Current health care models seem to have ignored, muted, or excluded the voices of the people they were intended to serve, resulting in health systems and care delivery models that do not respond to the needs of the people. This article describes a values-based approach to health and health care services in which the voices of the people are heard and listened to, and in which individuals and communities are informed participants in their own care. We draw parallels between contemporary concerns for decency in care giving to Florence Nightingale’s path-breaking work, first with the British military medical system and then Great Britain as a whole.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-151
Author(s):  
William G. Crook

As a member of the Sub-Committee on Manpower of the Council on Pediatric Practice, I've long been interested in allied health workers. Certainly, when such workers become available and are appropriately coordinated with others on the health team, the skills and talents of physicians can be used more productively. But I feel that the manpower pendulum in pediatrics may be swinging too far in the direction of allied health workers, and causing us to forget the crucial importance of primary physicians in delivering medical care.


Author(s):  
Ronald Labonté ◽  
Arne Ruckert

Strengthening health systems in poorer countries has long been a focal point in development aid debates. Visionary models of comprehensive primary health care caught the global imagination in the late 1970s but were quickly eclipsed with the rise of neoliberal globalization in the 1980s, truncated into ‘selective’ silos appealing to donor nations. ‘Investing in health’ for economic growth eclipsed more humanitarian principles for health assistance. Corporate philanthropies began to set health agendas resonant with those of a century earlier, while private health care financing and delivery models that grew under neoliberalism’s first wave (structural adjustment) have yet to yield to the evidence of the efficiencies of public health care models. The current push to achieve Universal Health Coverage captures the ongoing tension between the interests of private capital and the need for public goods.


Author(s):  
Pierre Pestieau ◽  
Mathieu Lefebvre

This chapter reviews the public health care systems as well as their challenges. It first shows how expenditure on health care has evolved in previous decades and deals with the reasons for the growth observed in almost every European country. It emphasizes the role of technological progress as a main explanatory factor of the increase in medical expenditure but also points to the challenges facing cost-containment policies. Especially, the main common features of health care systems in Europe, such as third-party payment, single provider approach and cost-based reimbursement are discussed. Finally the chapter shows that although inequalities in health exist in the population, health care systems are redistributive. Reforms are thus needed but the trade-off between budgetary efficiency and equity is difficult.


Author(s):  
Elise Paradis ◽  
Warren Mark Liew ◽  
Myles Leslie

Drawing on an ethnographic study of teamwork in critical care units (CCUs), this chapter applies Henri Lefebvre’s ([1974] 1991) theoretical insights to an analysis of clinicians’ and patients’ embodied spatial practices. Lefebvre’s triadic framework of conceived, lived, and perceived spaces draws attention to the role of bodies in the production and negotiation of power relations among nurses, physicians, and patients within the CCU. Three ethnographic vignettes—“The Fight,” “The Parade,” and “The Plan”—explore how embodied spatial practices underlie the complexities of health care delivery, making visible the hidden narratives of conformity and resistance that characterize interprofessional care hierarchies. The social orderings of bodies in space are consequential: seeing them is the first step in redressing them.


Author(s):  
Anmol Arora ◽  
Andrew Wright ◽  
Mark Cheng ◽  
Zahra Khwaja ◽  
Matthew Seah

AbstractHealthcare as an industry is recognised as one of the most innovative. Despite heavy regulation, there is substantial scope for new technologies and care models to not only boost patient outcomes but to do so at reduced cost to healthcare systems and consumers. Promoting innovation within national health systems such as the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom (UK) has been set as a key target for health care professionals and policy makers. However, while the UK has a world-class biomedical research industry, several reports in the last twenty years have highlighted the difficulties faced by the NHS in encouraging and adopting innovations, with the journey from idea to implementation of health technology often taking years and being very expensive, with a high failure rate. This has led to the establishment of several innovation pathways within and around the NHS, to encourage the invention, development and implementation of cost-effective technologies that improve health care delivery. These pathways span local, regional and national health infrastructure. They operate at different stages of the innovation pipeline, with their scope and work defined by location, technology area or industry sector, based on the specific problem identified when they were set up. In this introductory review, we outline each of the major innovation pathways operating at local, regional and national levels across the NHS, including their history, governance, operating procedures and areas of expertise. The extent to which innovation pathways address current challenges faced by innovators is discussed, as well as areas for improvement and future study.


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