Routledge Caring and Well-being: A Lifeworld Approach (Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Health and Illness)

Something is missing in contemporary health and social care. Health and illness is often measured in policy documents in economic terms, and clinical outcomes are enmeshed in statistical data, with the patient’s experience left to one side. This stimulating book is concerned with how to humanise health and social care and keep the person at the centre of practice. Caring and Well-Being opens by articulating Galvin and Todres’ innovative framework for humanising health care and closes with a synthesis of their argument and a discussion of how this can be applied in healthcare policy and practice. It: presents an innovative lifeworld-led approach to the humanisation of care; explores the concept of well-being and its relationship to suffering and outlines the rationale for a focus on them within this approach; discusses how the framework can be applied and how health and social practitioners can draw on aesthetic and empathic avenues to help develop their capacity for care; provides direction for policy, practice and education. Investigating what it means to be human in a health and social care context and what the things that make us feel more human are, this book presents new perspectives about how professionals can enhance their capacity for humanly sensitive care. It is a valuable work for all those interested in ideas about care and caring in a health and social context, including psychologists, doctors and nurses. Review ‘I congratulate Galvin and Todres for placing well-being and the person, with all of his or her complexities, at the center of our discipline. Caring and Well-being: A Lifeworld Approach is a milestone that will significantly shake nursing, moving our profession firmly into the domain of humanized health care. It is a must-read for every nurse academic, student and clinician.’ – Janice M. Morse, Professor and Barnes Presidential Endowed Chair at the University of Utah College of Nursing, USA; Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta, Canada; and Honorary Professor, Bournemouth University, UK. ‘This book is philosophically grounded, clinically relevant, informed by the best of qualitative research, and written with a genuine concern for the well-being of patients as well as the professionals who provide care for them. Galvin and Todres demonstrate how a solid understanding of patients as persons is both humane and eminently practical. Caring and Well-being is far more than a critique of how the relational and social aspects of care are overshadowed by the technical. It is a powerful guide for how we can move forward and create a healthier approach to treatment. The authors are practitioners and researchers who care deeply, have studied these issues thoroughly, and who in clear and eloquent prose remind us of what is at the heart of working in a caring and thoughtful way with patients.’ – Steen Halling, Professor of Psychology, Seattle University, USA. ‘Galvin and Todres offer a bold and passionately humane approach to healthcare. Their call to counterbalance the efficiency-driven, technology-based culture of healthcare with an emphasis on the experience of illness and suffering is timely and well-placed. Their approach is philosophically sophisticated, rooted in real-life healthcare practice, and genuinely innovative. In particular, their emphasis on seeing health as part of wellbeing and illness as part of the broader notion of suffering, demonstrates the philosophical innovation of their work. Their proposal to develop a "lifeworld-led healthcare" (contrasted with "patient-led care") and to understand illness in terms of existential homelessness turns attention to the pressing need to offer healthcare that is not just patient-centred, but one that is also engaged with the existential dimensions of illness and is authentically compassionate.’ – Havi Carel, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of the West of England, UK. ‘This book is a signific