From Family to Factory: Lost personal meaning in healthcare: Volume 2

If you want good personal healthcare – see a Vet:

(Volume 1)

His humanistic values and philosophical spirit are passionately unleashed against the destructive effects of commodification, managerialism and market in healthcare with searing precision.

Professor Sue Wheeler

Department of Counselling & Psychotherapy, University of Leicester

This book should be on every health professional’s desk

Professor John Sloboda FBA

Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Keele University

The last two decades have seen a disturbing and growing disparity emerge in our publicly-administered healthcare. Generally, while our technical interventions for the curable get better, our other human engagements and understandings get worse. This is happening despite energetic political commitments, enormous funding and numerous specialist training and regulatory bodies. Why?

This second volume of the Anthology documents this new era and proposes that the technical and managerial approaches that are so helpful in tackling curable diseases (the ‘factory’) are now serving us poorly elsewhere – the larger fraction of our healthcare where we need, instead, personally attuned contacts of flexibility and imagination (a ‘family’). The complexity of this errored evolution and its consequences are demonstrated by lively and engaging vignettes of healthcare encounters linked by wide-scoped and unusual explanations.