Complexity in Healthcare and the Language of Consultation : Exploring the Other Side of Medicine

Arguing that effective, modern healthcare needs to be a balance of both traditional, clinical consultation and organisational and systems consultation, this text integrates the two theories, providing the intellectual equipment necessary in order to deliver effective care provision. This book provides an important contribution to the new and growing field of 'narrative-based medicine'. It specifically addresses the largest area of medical activity primary care. It provides both a theoretical framework and practical skills for dealing with individual consultations family work clinical supervision and teamwork and offers a comprehensive approach to the whole range of work in primary care. Using a wide range of clinical examples it shows how professionals in primary care can help clarify patients' existing stories and elucidate new stories. It can be used as a training resource and includes exercises and summaries of key points to consider. It is based on and describes an established evaluated training method and is of immediate and significant practical use to readers. It is essential reading for general practitioners practice nurses and others in the primary care team psychologists family therapists counsellors and other professionals attached to primary care. GP trainers tutors and course organisers will find it a valuable educational tool. Professionals elsewhere in primary care such as pharmacists dentists and optometrists and academics in medical sociology and medical anthropology will also find it very useful Content: Front Cover Contents Preface and acknowledgements About the author Chapter 1: Introduction: the three kinds of consultation Chapter 2: What are we talking about? Chapter 3: The key to complexity: systems consultation Chapter 4: What seems to be the trouble? Why healthcare is complicated, and will get worse Chapter 5: Theory to practice: principles, guidelines and some rules Chapter 6: Consultation with working groups and organisations Chapter 7: Consultation as teaching and training Chapter 8: Consultation in assessing and managing clinical problems. Chapter 9: Consultation as self-management: consulting with oneselfChapter 10: Consulting the client: the patient as specialist Chapter 11: Medicine as art, art as medicine: the humanities in healthcare Chapter 12: Systems consultation and the other side of common sense References Back Cover. Steinberg (formerly Senior Clinical Tutor, Priory Ticehurst House Hospital, Sussex) integrates new ideas from chaos and complexity theories, clinical work and aspects of group and psychodynamic theory to create a new consultative approach