Community Health Books

The closure of mental hospital written by prof. Peter Hall was an excellent reference book to describe the background, history and development of community psychiatry in England.

I had this book for my community health textbook. Comparing with other textbook, this book is really hard to understand. The author is trying hard enough to sound like a great researcher using jargons and difficult words to impress the public. As a student nurse, I would be much happier with a textbook that explains everything in laymans term. It's hard enough for us to understand the concept without those fancy words. A note for the authors, we like simple textbook not a complicated one. A complicated book is not necessarily a good book. In my opinion other textbooks are way better than this one.

This book was one of the few I could find for a community mental health and behavioral health systems course. I knew the book was dense with material (my students are undergrads), but I did not anticipate my students' response to it. For them there was too much information. Maybe the text fairs better in Masters level courses. As the teacher, I wasn't thrilled with the overall organization (chapter wise). The first two chapters focusing on history and context were wonderful, but then the jump to ecological modal and prevention was awkward. Each chapter was of varying quality (may were good), but there was not a clear relationship between the chapters or why they were clumped in units.

This is a niche, technical book for the researcher or sociologist exploring local healthcare policy. It is I think that this was somewhat of a pioneering study and there has not been anything else like this book. The book is part of a larger series of works from the National Commission on Community Health Services of the 1960's. Wilson uses the reputational approach--similar to Floyd Hunter's study of Atlanta. He finds some elitist trends (like Hunter) in who is influential in local healthcare policy. My validity concerns include the low number of cases and the poor response. Otherwise, this is a good book to read alongside of Conant (see my other review)and any work by Elling, and especially Paul Starr's "The Social Transformation of American Medicine."

This anthology details the origins, extent, and solutions for drug use and trafficking in Latino communities. The chapters focus on various stages of distributing drugs (addiction and selling) and curing the abuse (prevention and counseling). Several Latino subpopulations are emphasized as well (adolescents, women). The contributors have various writing styles. Some of the work was number-crunching, others were historical or merely descriptive. AIDS was a backdrop to the discussion; there was one AIDS-focused chapter and a few chapters ended with the topic. However, the overlap of drug use and prostitution or male-to-male sex in the AIDS spread was not brought up; I found that kinda disappointing. This book was compiled over a decade ago and it may be dated. The use of "Hispanic" rather than "Latino" is an example of this fact. The book differentiates and highlights Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans. Though other Latino groups may feel left out, I applaud this goal to recognize ethnic distinctions within the Latino population. Though there were some Spanish-surnamed authors, I get the sense that this was mostly Anglo writing on the Latino populations. This may feel a bit colonizing to some readers. Still, I am glad there's a book out there that documents the problem and the cure amongst this racial minority group.

touches on a lot of subjects, but author depends on a lot of other authors and uses way too many inserts from other places.

Family Nursing Practice was required reading for one of my Family Nurse Practitioner classes. Its interesing reading, but rather lightweight regarding useful material. The authors use frequent case studies and examples that are carried on throughout each chapter, which help to illustrate the important points and to hold the reader's attention.

This is a book for American policy makers. It is not a book for clinicians so it is not meant for me. It has reconditions for clinicians but these recommendations are probably better made elsewhere by other sources. If you are a clinician in Australia, for example, there are a number of organisations that should be approached individually such as one's college (one's board, in other words), hospital (for ACHS and in-house measures), HIC, and, or course, one's insurer. All of those people will be able tell you exactly what to study. Insurers have money at stake so they are well motivated. I asked a legal officer at my insurer if they could help with quality issues and she said "you're kidding" and paused while I wondered if I had asked a stupid question or offended her.

I read this book so now I know what a microsystem is. I explained to my hospital CEO that I knew what a microsystem was. She said, "well, you know what `micro' is don't you?" and paused while I wondered. One can think of the provision of health care being provided by four levels: the state, the hospital, microsystem, and individual practitioners. Microsystems are administrative and clinical things that mediate between the hospital and the individual practitioner. They include ward rounds, and drug interaction software and receptionists bookings. They are important because they are they only way to decrease human factors in errors. Human factor analysis involves putting in place systems so that when people make inevitable errors, no harm is done. By definition, the individual clinician will have difficulty running these systems them self. I could not work out why airlines would be the first people to introduce human factor analysis but I suppose that when a plane crashes the pilots die and can not be punished. This book came up in an Amazon search for "human factors" and human factors are central to a clinician improving their quality, but human there was only one small paragraph about human factors in the whole book.

Reading this book, I thought of 24 ways that quality at my own hospital might be improved. I still got some ideas for improving the quality of my own practice that are not central and that I probably will not implement
~telling people the outcome statistics for my biological and talking treatments
~writing and using checklists developed from treatment guidelines
~using electronic prescription generation
~having my patient literature include sections about confidentiality and what will done if they stop turning up to see me
~using quality surveys at the termination of treatment, perhaps collecting data like the authors of "50 Ways to Fail as a Therapist" (I have not read it yet)

The manual packing was not what i expected to see. It was simply recopied text that was wrapped up. really poor, I thought I was getting a book

I read this book the night before my micro board exam and made well over national average and class average. I recommend you use it to review if you've used it along with your class.