Counseling about Cancer: Strategies for Genetic Counseling

Charles Kenney

Transforming Health Care: Virginia Mason Medical Center's Pursuit of the Perfect Patient Experience

For decades, the manufacturing industry has employed the Toyota Production System -- the most powerful production method in the world -- to reduce waste, improve quality, reduce defects and increase worker productivity. In 2001, Virginia Mason Medical Center, an integrated healthcare delivery system in Seattle, Washington set out to achieve its compelling vision to become The Quality Leader and to fulfill that vision, adopted the Toyota Production System as its management method. Transforming Health Care: Virginia Mason Medical Center's Pursuit of the Perfect Patient Experience takes you on the journey of of Virginia Mason Medical Center's pursuit of the perfect patient experience through the application of lean principles, tools, and methodology. Over the last several years Virginia Mason has become internationally known for its journey towards perfection by applying the Toyota Production System to healthcare. The book takes readers step by step through Virginia Mason's journey as it seeks to provide perfection to its customer - the patient. This book shows you how you use this system to transform your own organization.

Alexander R. Luria, Alexdandr R. Luria, Aleksandr R. Luria

The Working Brain: An Introduction to Neuropsychology

This important book, by the most distinguished Soviet psychologist of our time, is the product of almost forty years of extensive research aimed at understanding the cerebral basis of human psychological activity. The main part of the book describes what we know today about the individual systems that make up the human brain and about the role of the individual zones of the cerebral hemispheres in the task of providing the necessary conditions for higher forms of mental activity to take place. Finally, Luria analyzes the cerebral organization of perception and action, of attention and memory, or speech and intellectual processes, and attempts to fit the facts obtained by neuropsychological studies of individual brain systems into their appropriate place in the grand design of psychological science.

Suzanne D. Schneider

Mexican Community Health and the Politics of Health Reform

The struggle of Mexicans to secure quality health care is the focal point of this study. Large-scale transformations in Mexico's national health care system have resulted in budget cuts, increased user fees and decreased public services. At the local level community-based health groups that practice popular medicine are addressing the challenge by training health promoters in a variety of preventive and healing practices and offering low-cost services in community clinics. Their health care approach integrates local and global practices ranging from Mexican herbalism to Chinese medicine. Suzanne Schneider's ethnographic study of grassroots health groups in Morelos, Mexico, addresses the lives of the participants and the groups' contributions to community health. What draws women to these groups? Are they reacting to their experiences with formal health care? To what extent are the groups' teachings applied in the household and accepted throughout the community? Does group participation offer women new sources of empowerment or avenues to income generation? Does the government support these groups? How do they fit into larger trends of health care reform and the shift toward ...