Fb2 The Trust Crisis in Healthcare ePub

This book is a compendium of essays by different authors who are long-term professionals in the health care industry. They examine the role of trust in health care delivery, in the marketing of health care products and services, and in the media. Each essay is well written and understandable, even to someone like me who has never practiced medicine or studied its practice. The unspoken emphasis of the book is the relationship between health care providers and health care consumers. This is unfortunate as I believe it should have included an essay on each of the following topics: the relationship between health care workers and their respective professional societies, and the relationship between health care teaching institutions and their students/alumni. The book could have also used more case studies, or specifically, included several chapters built around major case studies. Instead, most of the essays seem grounded on the long-term experiences of the author, and the results of surveys.

Overall, an interesting book, but not a great one.

"There is no profit in curing the body, if in the process, we destroy the soul."

Compare to: The Trust Prescription for Healthcare: Building Your Reputation with Consumers (Ache Management Series), Ed.: David Shore, Ph. D.; Health Administration Press, March 2005

Emphasis:

1) Codependency and addiction are intrinsically not trustworthy and dishonest, so it's hard to fit the concept of trustworthiness into the current form of healthcare which is intrinsically addictive and codependent/enabling.

2) I read "ruse" and "ploy" into the teachings in this book. Both what they recommend and the way they recommend it --- and how it is to be done.

3) When one wants to teach trust, one must establish trustworthiness - that isn't done here, despite a listing of credentials and a celebrity endorsement. --One, one might note, based on fear-- that hasn't been accomplished.

4) I detect SOCIALISM and I they deliberately left out the tacit RATIONING ISSUE!

5) "AS for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord": Where is FAITH - as you understand it - in this incomplete treatise on TRUST?

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>Let me be frank: from the beginning: most practicing physicians already know most of what's in this barely-edited assemblage of lectures (possibly even transcripts) and should be just a well served by a listing of its bullet points and some discussion thereof. What is really fascinating is what this book represents: shot full of bald discrepancies and inconsistencies, another round of somebody trying to get famous (claiming)trying to tell us what's wrong with us. Yet, this time we must listen. It's very important to our survival and success. In fact, essential.

No doubt this is a cast of intelligent men and women who have diligently presented their expertise. No doubt they've studied their specialties for decades. No doubt that the executives for whom these lectures are programmed will benefit from learning how to make their competitive companies - and for a very few of us, our practices - appear trustworthy, and the "Trust Initiative" that is part of the Harvard School of Public Health will continue to prosper under the tutelage of these very smart marketing-branding experts and the clinicians who are tucked into the curriculum to give it scientific patina and street cred. (Where is Abraham Flexner when you need him?)

Creating the appearance of trust is not in itself, a priori, necessarily a trustworthy or estimable act.

The institutionalization and "professionalization" of ideology results in sclerosis of those same ideas - of the thought-generation process itself, even as data and product appear to accelerate in development.

Doctors as a group are very likely to interpret concordance as consequence.

Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

Addiction is the most serious illness in our society today, and the most common addictions are to "more": outcomes and perfection, leading to isolation and self-pity,

Until we come to social and societal consensus and convention on what constitutes reasonable and necessary care (read: "rationing") we will never put a lid on issues of access or price and all stakeholders will continue to do battle thinly disguised as ballet. Don't believe everything you read. How did we get to this?

Why did the evolution of a third-party payment system coincide with the evolution of waste, fraud, and abuse? Do I want to be a "brand"? (Is that a good thing?) As scientists, humanists, therapists and sociologists, are we really getting to the heart of matters, the core, or is this just too scary? What is true compassion, true kindness? A stopped clock is right twice a day. It is futile to fight one habit by another habit, and one does not think ones way out of a problem with the same thinking one used to get into the problem. We have met the enemy, and he is us.

In Asian diagnostic medicine, a prominent writer has stated that the practitioner who takes more than two visits to solve a problem isn't very good. Gracious, we'd go out of business!