Main description:

Demands on healthcare systems are increasingly complex and diverse. Consumerism, multiculturalism and regulation challenge practitioners and policymakers. This has led to urgent debate about the value and purpose of healthcare as people seek to make serious, well-thought through decisions. This book helps readers to make rational decisions about healthcare provision in the context of complex and diverse values. It offers no easy solutions, instead presenting a range of perspectives and arguments on values-based practice, an increasingly influential approach to managing value-conflicts/differences in medicine, psychiatry, health and social care. Readers must make their own minds up about the controversies, but this book will give them a sense of the scene and the ability to defend their own position with clarity and confidence. This is a valuable resource for health practitioners and managers, academics in health services research and policy and students of management, bioethics, applied philosophy and political and social theory.

Contents:

List of contributors; Editorial introduction Michael Loughlin; Part I. VBP: Values, Practice and Philosophy: 1. Values-based practice: the facts K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford; 2. Values-based clinical reasoning Ed Peile; 3. Liberating practice from philosophy - a critical examination of Values-Based Practice and its underpinnings Elselijn Kingma and Natalie Banner; 4. Values-based practice and authoritarianism Tim Thornton; 5. VBP: but which values? And whose? Bob Brecher; 6. Reframing health care: philosophy for medicine and human flourishing Phil Hutchinson and Rupert Read; 7. Values-based practice: a new tool or a new package? Mona Gupta; 8. Values or virtues? Richard Hamilton; 9. Values-Based Practice, competence and expertise Gideon Calder; 10. Wishing to remain ill: an unacceptable value? Harry Lesser; 11. VBP and global health Sridhar Venkatapuram; 12. Is VBP useful in psychiatry? - A practitioner's view Alistair Stewart; 13. Living with uncertainty: a first person plural response to eleven commentaries K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford; Part II. VBM and the Basis for Medical Decisions: Survival, Security and Flourishing: 14. Values, foundations and being human Miles Little; 15. Eliciting axioms to enrich debates about the pharmaceutical industry Wendy Lipworth and Kathleen Montgomery; 16. Using the survival-security-flourishing model to explain the emergence and shape of the medical profession Kathleen Montgomery and Wendy Lipworth; 17. Does medicine need a base? A critique of modest foundationalism Ross E. G. Upshur; 18. VBM and the challenge of person-centred medicine Andrew Miles; 19. Values-based medicine, foundationalism and casuistry Mark R. Tonelli; 20. Values-based medicine and patient autonomy Robyn Bluhm; 21. Responses to contributions, suggestions and critiques Miles Little; Part III. Conclusions: 22. Walking the VB-talk: concluding reflections on models, methods and practical pay-offs K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford and Miles Little; Index.