A practical strategy for transforming the UK and other healthcare
systems... offering an affordable, sustainable and compassionate
alternative to the present mess. Healthcare systems across the developed
world are in trouble. Changing patterns of disease, an ageing population
and advances in drugs and technology feed an inexorable rise in costs
outrunning our best efforts to contain them. At a human level the system
is coming under intolerable strain. Demands for cost savings squeeze out
the time and humanity needed for good care and quality relationships.
Safety suffers. Staff become demoralised, stressed and burned out. In
the first two parts of Humanising Healthcare and focusing on the UK's
National Health Service, Dr Hannah explores the fundamental assumptions
which have brought us to this point and which likewise inform our
current inadequate responses. She dissects the burgeoning regime of
regulation and inspection that tries to impose ever tighter controls on
a healthcare system that needs to be freed to serve its citizen
patients. In the final part of the book, 'Another Way Is Possible', Dr
Margaret Hannah offers a practical alternative strategy based on
numerous examples of transformative practice from the UK and around the
world. It promises a sustainable culture of healthcare that will enable
us all to live healthy, fulfilled lives at a fraction of the current
cost. Nuka Chief among Dr Hannah's case studies is the 'Nuka' model of
care in Alaska. Healthcare in the Nuka system is based on reconnecting
people into the web of life. Don Berwick, a former health adviser to
President Obama and a founder of the highly respected Institute for
Healthcare Improvement, has declared that Nuka "is probably the leading
example of healthcare redesign in the world. US healthcare suffers from
high costs and low quality. This system has reversed that: the quality
of care is the highest I have seen anywhere in the world, and the costs
are highly sustainable. It's extraordinary. It is surely leading
healthcare to its new and proper destination."
