168 books match the query 'Health Policy' and 7 start with r

cover of Recovery's Edge: An Ethnography of Mental Health Care and Moral Agency

Recovery's Edge

An Ethnography of Mental Health Care and Moral Agency

Neely Laurenzo Myers

Vanderbilt University Press, 2015

In 2003 the Bush Administration's New Freedom Commission asked mental health service providers to begin promoting "recovery" rather than churning out long-term, "chronic" mental health service users. Recovery's Edge sends us to urban America to view the inner workings of a mental health clinic run, in part, by people who are themselves "in recovery" from mental illness.

In this provocative narrative, Neely Myers sweeps us up in her own journey through three years of ethnographic research at this unusual site, providing a nuanced account of different approaches to mental health care. Recovery's Edge critically examines the high bar we set for people in recovery through intimate stories of people struggling to find meaningful work, satisfying relationships, and independent living.

This book is a recipient of the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of medicine.
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cover of Reducing Firearm Injury and Death: A Public Health Sourcebook on Guns

Reducing Firearm Injury and Death

A Public Health Sourcebook on Guns

Trudy A. Karlson

Rutgers University Press, 1997

There are few issues more explosive than guns. "Guns don't kill people, people kill people," is an often-heard response to calls for firearm control. But are there ways to make guns safer without placing further restrictions on gun owners? Can guns be engineered to reduce the number and severity of injuries?

This book is about guns and new solutions for addressing problems they create. Trudy Karlson and Stephen Hargarten, two experts in public health and injury control, show readers how guns are products, designed to injure and kill, and how changes in the design, technology, and marketing of firearms can lead to reductions in the number of injuries and fatalities.

Just as innovations in the design and technology of motor vehicles succeeded in creating safer cars, Karlson and Hargarten describe how responsible changes to gun products can reduce the number of serious injuries and fatalities. The injury control perspective illustrates how the characteristics of guns and ammunition are associated with their ability to cause injury and death. It also provides options for how guns can be re-engineered to ensure a greater degree of safety and protection. Reducing Firearm Injury and Death teaches basic facts about guns and gun injuries, and by reframing the problem of firearms as a public health issue, offers hope for saving lives.


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cover of Reproductive Justice: The Politics of Health Care for Native American Women

Reproductive Justice

The Politics of Health Care for Native American Women

Gurr, Barbara

Rutgers University Press, 2015

In Reproductive Justice, sociologist Barbara Gurr provides the first analysis of Native American women’s reproductive healthcare and offers a sustained consideration of the movement for reproductive justice in the United States.

The book examines the reproductive healthcare experiences on Pine Ridge Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota—where Gurr herself lived for more than a year. Gurr paints an insightful portrait of the Indian Health Service (IHS)—the federal agency tasked with providing culturally appropriate, adequate healthcare to Native Americans—shedding much-needed light on Native American women’s efforts to obtain prenatal care, access to contraception, abortion services, and access to care after sexual assault. Reproductive Justice goes beyond this local story to look more broadly at how race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, and nation inform the ways in which the government understands reproductive healthcare and organizes the delivery of this care. It reveals why the basic experience of reproductive healthcare for most Americans is so different—and better—than for Native American women in general, and women in reservation communities particularly. Finally, Gurr outlines the strengths that these communities can bring to the creation of their own reproductive justice, and considers the role of IHS in fostering these strengths as it moves forward in partnership with Native nations. 

Reproductive Justice offers a respectful and informed analysis of the stories Native American women have to tell about their bodies, their lives, and their communities. 
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cover of Reproductive Rights in a Global Context: South Africa, Uganda, Peru, Denmark, United States, Vietnam, Jordan

Reproductive Rights in a Global Context

South Africa, Uganda, Peru, Denmark, United States, Vietnam, Jordan

Lara M. Knudsen

Vanderbilt University Press, 2006

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2006

Traveling alone when she was between 17 and 22, with no institutional affiliation and no financial assistance, the author visited five developing countries and two developed ones on five continents. Her goal was to extend her own experience in an abortion clinic in Portland, Oregon. Lara Knudsen interviewed over 90 women's rights activists, health professionals, NGO workers, and government officials, gaining a sense of both official policies and the actual delivery of services in local clinics. The book places the experiences of women within the global context of how international population control agendas have influenced women's reproductive rights in the past, and how the changing international discourse on reproductive health continues to influence those rights today.
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cover of Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic: Transcultural Communication about SARS

Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic

Transcultural Communication about SARS

Huiling Ding

Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

2016 CCCC Best Book Award in Technical and Scientific Communication

In the past ten years, we have seen great changes in the ways government organizations and media respond to and report on emerging global epidemics. The first outbreak to garner such attention was SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). In Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic, Huiling Ding uses SARS to explore how various cultures and communities made sense of the epidemic and communicated about it. She also investigates the way knowledge production and legitimation operate in global epidemics, the roles that professionals and professional communicators, as well as individual citizens, play in the communication process, points of contention within these processes, and possible entry points for ethical and civic intervention.

Focusing on the rhetorical interactions among the World Health Organization, the United States, China, and Canada, Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic investigates official communication and community grassroots risk tactics employed during the SARS outbreak. It consists of four historical cases, which examine the transcultural risk communication about SARS in different geopolitical regions at different stages. The first two cases deal with risk communication practices at the early stage of the SARS epidemic when it originated in southern China. The last two cases move to transcultural rhetorical networks surrounding SARS.

With such threats as SARS, avian flu, and swine flu capturing the public imagination and prompting transnational public health preparedness efforts, the need for a rhetoric of global epidemics has never been greater. Government leaders, public health officials, health care professionals, journalists, and activists can learn how to more effectively craft and manage transcultural risk communication from Ding’s examination of the complex and varied modes of communication around SARS. In addition to offering a detailed case study, Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic provides a critical methodology that professional communicators can use in their investigations of epidemics and details approaches to facilitating more open, participatory risk communication at all levels.

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cover of Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town

Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town

Laura Hart

Rutgers University Press, 2023

In disease cluster communities across the country, environmental contamination from local industries is often suspected as a source of disease. But civic action is notoriously hampered by the slow response from government agencies to investigate the cause of disease and the complexities of risk assessment. 

In Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town, Laura Hart examines another understudied dimension of community inaction: the role of emotion and its relationship to community experiences of social belonging and inequality. Using a cancer cluster community in Northwest Ohio as a case study, Hart advances an approach to risk that grapples with the complexities of community belonging, disconnect, and disruption in the wake of suspected industrial pollution. Her research points to a fear driven not only by economic anxiety, but also by a fear of losing security within the community—a sort of pride that is not only about status, but connectedness. Hart reveals the importance of this social form of risk—the desire for belonging and the risk of not belonging—ultimately arguing that this is consequential to how people make judgements and respond to issues. Within this context where the imperative for self-protection is elusive, affected families experience psychosocial and practical conflicts as they adapt to cancer as a way of life. Considering a future where debates about risk and science will inevitably increase, Hart considers possibilities for the democratization of risk management and the need for transformative approaches to environmental justice.
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cover of Rural Pain, Republican Gain: How the Republican Party Is Killing Rural America and Why Democrats Are Blamed

Rural Pain, Republican Gain

How the Republican Party Is Killing Rural America and Why Democrats Are Blamed

Michael E. Shepherd

University of Chicago Press, 2026

An eye-opening look at how Republican policies have affected health outcomes in rural communities and why poor, rural white voters are turning to the Republican Party—not despite this harm, but because of it.

Over the last four decades, the health of rural Americans has been in free fall. Just as opioid and gun deaths have ripped apart rural communities, hospitals have closed at alarming rates, leaving millions desperately far from care. At the same time, voters in struggling rural communities have increasingly come to vote for the Republican Party.

In Rural Pain, Republican Gain, Michael E. Shepherd demonstrates that these two trends are closely connected. At both the federal and state levels, the Republican Party has increasingly enacted policies that worsen rural health. Rural voters are not indifferent to this development (quite the contrary), but they misassign blame, in part, because the Democratic Party is more commonly associated with health-related policy initiatives and has ownership of health as an issue area. Republican politicians can reap rewards from their own destructive policies by appealing to the shared grievances of rural people.

Shepherd draws on new, wide-ranging data, including in-depth studies of the opioid epidemic, hospital closures, and COVID-19. In so doing, he quantifies the harm of Republican policymaking and its disproportionate effect on rural communities, recasting how readers understand growing Republican support among less healthy, lower-income rural white Americans.

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