Rethinking Healthcare Improvement

What is ‘good’ healthcare? Does that new procedure benefit both patient A and patient B? Bringing together the fields of philosophy and public health, this open access book provides a much-needed framework for navigating the ethical issues that arise in healthcare improvement. Acknowledging the complexity in attempts to raise the quality of healthcare, from different cultural and intellectual perspectives to ever-increasing costs, Cribb, Mitchell and Entwistle reveal the contribution philosophy can make to improvement activities. In four clear parts they uncover the ethical impulses already embedded in health services and connect them with philosophical literature to present an original and practically useful guide to answering questions about what is better and why. In so doing, they explore a number of ethical approaches, including value-led systems of improvement and a decentring of consequentialist methods in order to prioritise compassion and social justice over figures and outcomes. Throughout the editors advocate ‘pragmatic pluralism’, maintaining that healthcare demands a reflective, context sensitive approach which is cautious about the universality of claims and the scalability of improvement interventions. This accessible text effortlessly combines theory and practice with a wide range of real-world case studies, including urban poverty screening in US primary care and initiatives introduced in the UK to ensure anti-racist practice. Across social policy, healthcare management, bioethics and beyond, this is a must-read for students, scholars and practitioners alike. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Wellcome Trust.