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Talking about Health

208 pages

Wiley-Blackwell
2009
Roxanne Parrott
English
ISBN: 1405177578
207 Pages
PDF
1.29 MB

Written by an award-winning researcher and professor whose work straddles the fields of communication
and healthcare, Talking About Health explores the importance of health communication in the 21st century,
and how it affects us all.
Organized around six key questions about health and communication:
How ‘Normal’ am I? What are My ‘Risk’ Factors? Why Don’t We Get ‘Care’? Is the Public Good ‘Good’ for Me?
Who Profits from My Health? and What’s Politics Got to Do with It? Provides readers with specific tools which
which to better navigate the healthcare system Translates what we know about communication and health into
useful guidelines for everyday practice Includes discussions of politics and healthcare, genetic testing, and
alternative care.

Now Americans are not so confident. Surveys show that health care is the number one concern among voters
today. The cry for Federal legislation to protect patients’ rights reflects a growing anxiety about
quality—fear that we won’t get the care we need when we need it.

And researchers have confirmed that our fears are valid. The quality of health care in this country is
not ideal: quality varies widely across health plans and providers. Many procedures and therapies are
used too often while others are not used often enough. No institution or office is free from errors.
And these problems are pervasive. Although most of the information we have comes from managed care

organizations, we now see that quality is uneven throughout the industry—not only in health plans,
but also in physicians’ offices, nursing homes, hospitals, and home health care agencies.

What makes this National anxiety especially powerful is how little we really know. We may be aware
that some health plans and some providers deliver poor quality care, but the real issue for people
is much more personal. What about my health plan? How good is my doctor? How do I choose among the
options available to me?