Books
| Jonas and Kovner's Health Care Delivery in the United 8th Edition by Anthony R. Kovner & Steven Jonas How do we understand and also assess the health care of America? Where is health care provided? What are the characteristics of those institutions which provide it? Over the short term, how are changes in health care provisions affecting the health of the population, the cost of care, and access to care? Health Care Delivery in the United States, 8th Edition discusses these and other core issues in the field. Under the editorship of Dr. Kovner and with the addition of Dr. James Knickman, Senior VP of Evaluation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, leading thinkers and practitioners in the field examine how medical knowledge creates new healthcare services. Emerging and recurrent issues from wide perspectives of health policy and public health are also discussed. With an easy to understand format and a focus on the major core challenges of the delivery of health care, this is the textbook of choice for course work in health care, the handbook for administrators and policy makers, and the standard for in-service training programs. |
| Animal and human physiology - A step towards integrative physiology GROS François Tec & Doc Lavoisier editions Report in French excepted Summary and Recommendations Physiology had its hey-day and indeed dominated academic life science teaching curricula for many years, during which time it generated considerable amounts of research work in numerous laboratories. We must today, however, recognise that there is a certain degree of disinterest both among young students and their academic staff, doubtless for reasons which stem from the spectacular developments in molecular biology, genetics (and more recently genomics; cf. the Académie's report "Development and applications of genomics", ed. TEC et DOC, 1999). The disinterest seems to be affecting mainly the field of physiology of major functions, more so than cellular physiology and neuro-physiology. We agree to see physiology, both at the whole body level and down to cellular level, as a major field since it deals with the integration processes of living bodies into the environment. Moreover, there are strong currents among proponents of genomics that hold that without a powerful rehabilitation of physiology (so-called integrative physiology) the changeover to functional and comparative analysis of genomes will suffer serious set-backs. The study of how medicinal drugs act and, in more general terms, that of human pathology, will progress with difficulty if no new impetus provided to physiopathology. This report attempts to provide a status view of various aspects of this major field - after taking into its stride the developments, history and main concepts that run from Claude Bernard's work to today - : physiology of our main functions, physiology of developmental and ageing processes, ecophysiology, physiopathology, etc. The report also touches on some logistic aspects of the question ; animal experiments, artificial organs, instrumentation, modelling … The report closes with an overview of the teaching of physiology in France. It contains a series of recommendations related to the recruitment of research scientists, physicians and veterinary doctors in the public research establishments and university laboratories, in the mixed teaching and research doctoral departments, and at the same time the report insists on infrastructure and equipment necessities. Problems specific to physiology in the plant reign will be dealt with in a separate report. |
