Rethinking Healthcare Improvement

What is ‘good’ healthcare? Can we define and deliver it, or will we simply make things better for some people and worse for others? Bringing together the fields of philosophy and healthcare quality, this open access book provides a much-needed framework for understanding and navigating the conceptual and ethical issues at the heart of healthcare improvement. Acknowledging the complexity in attempts to raise the quality of healthcare, including from different cultural and intellectual perspectives to ever-increasing costs, this book reveals the contribution philosophy can make to the provision of quality healthcare. In four clear parts, it uncovers the ethical commitments already embedded in health services and connects them with philosophical literature to present an original and practically useful approach to answering questions about what is better and why. Throughout, the authors advocate ‘pragmatic pluralism’, emphasizing compassion, social justice and practical wisdom alongside techniques, measures and outcomes, and maintain 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 help underpin anti-racist practice. Across public policy, bioethics, healthcare management, social sciences and beyond, it 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.