Rationing: Constructed Realities and Professional Practices

by David Hughes (Editor), Donald Light (Editor)

Overview

This volume contributes to the ongoing debate about healthcare rationing by bringing together case studies of resource allocation at different levels of the healthcare system. Drawing on research from the United Kingdom, Europe and North America, it examines issues such as prioritisation and access to care in a range of hospital and community settings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780631228578
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	03/29/2002
Series:	Sociology of Health and Illness Monographs
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.92(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

David Hughes is a Professor in the School of Health Science at the University of Wales Swansea and Dean of the Faculty of Education and Health Studies. His current research interests include the reformed NHS, health care rationing and the changing division of health labour. He has written on a range of topics in the fields of medical sociology, socio-legal studies and health policy.

Donald W. Light is the Professor of comparative health care systems at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and a fellow at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Trained as a sociologist at the University of Chicago and Brandeis, he is a Faculty Associate in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. Professor Light has written about distributive justice in the BMJ and is co-author of Benchmarks of Fairness for Health Care Reform (1996).

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors.

1. Introduction. A sociological perspective on rationing: power, rhetoric and situated practices (Donald Light and David Hughes).

2. Risk and Rationing. Rationing through risk assessment in clinical genetics: all categories have wheels (Lindsay Prior).

3. Governmentality and risk: setting priorities in the new NHS (Paul Joyce).

4. Rationing in Hospitals. Categorisation and micro-rationing: access to care in a French emergency department (Carine Vassy).

5. Everyday experiences of implicit rationing: comparing the voices of nurses in California and British Columbia (Ivy Lynn Bourgeault, Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Jacqueline Choiniere, Joel Lexchin, Eric Mykhalovskiy, Suzanne Peters and Jerry White).

6. Rationing in the Community. Rationing health car to disabled people (Gary L. Albrecht).

7. Categorising to exclude: the discursive construction of cases in community mental health teams (Lesley Griffiths).

8. Professional Resistance. Subverting criteria: the role of precedent in decisions to finance surgery (John Heritage, Elizabeth Boyd and Lawrence Kleinman).

9. Clinical actions and financial constraints: the limits to rationing intensive care (Irvine Lapsley and Kath Melia).

Index.