From Family to Factory

The last two decades have seen a disturbing and growing disparity emerge in our publicly-administered healthcare. Generally, while our technical interventions for the curable get better, our other human engagements and understandings get worse. This is happening despite energetic political commitments, enormous funding and numerous specialist training and regulatory bodies. Why? This second volume of the Anthology documents this new era and proposes that the technical and managerial approaches that are so helpful in tackling curable diseases (the 'factory') are now serving us poorly elsewhere - the larger fraction of our healthcare where we need, instead, personally attuned contacts of flexibility and imagination (a 'family'). The complexity of this errored evolution and its consequences are demonstrated by lively and engaging vignettes of healthcare encounters linked by wide-scoped and unusual explanations.