Putting Systems and Complexity Sciences Into Practice

This idea-packed resource takes systems and complexity sciences out of blue-sky territory and into the concrete world of contemporary healthcare practice. Beginning with a new reframing of health and illness, its chapters redesign traditional disease-centered models of care into modern, health-centered-and patient-centered-health service systems. The approaches shown here combine innovation and common sense to recognize and attend to patients' needs across areas including health education and training, information accessibility, health service organization and delivery, and disease in individual context. The variety of solutions applied to this wide spectrum of issues shows the suitability of systems, complexity, and adaptive thinking to the ongoing objectives of making health services more responsive, effective, and equitable.

Highlights of the coverage:

 

•  Healthy smoker: an oxymoron? Maybe, but it is more complicated than that
  
• Transforming monitoring and improving care with variability-derived clinical decision support
  
• Linking Gulf War illness to genome instability, somatic evolution, and complex adaptive systems
  
• Complexity of knowledge in primary care: understanding the discipline's requisite knowledge: a bibliometric study
  
• New ways of knowing and researching: integrating complexity into a translational health sciences program
  
• Understanding the emergency department ecosystem using agent-based modelling

Putting Systems and Complexity Sciences into Practice is an inspiring idea book that sill interest health policymakers, health financiers, organizational leaders, healthcare administrators, clinicians, researchers, students, and interested lay readers.                                                                                                              

 

Joachim P. Sturmberg, MBBS, DORACOG, MFM, PhD, FRACGP, is conjoint associate professor of General Practice in the School of Medicine and Public Health, Faculty of Health and Medicine, at The University of Newcastle in Newcastle, Australia. He is a graduate of Lübeck Medical School in Germany, where he also completed his PhD. Since 1989, Sturmberg has worked in an urban group practice in the Central Coast of New South Wales. His research focuses on understanding the complex interconnected features of person-centered healthcare. Together with his collaborators, Sturmberg proposes that a truly functional health system ought to always focus on the needs of the person/patient across all domains affecting health -- local health delivery services, local and regional social and economic infrastructure and services, as well as in all portfolios at the national policy levels. These complex interdependent features of a person-centered healthcare system are described by the health vortex model. Sturmberg's current research focuses on operationalizing the health vortex model, integrating the physiology of health with health care delivery, the socioeconomic domains affecting health, and the impact of policy decisions on health and the healthcare system.