News Notes on Health Care
January-February 2012. We proudly announce an addition to our Advisors, William Brennan, MFA.
Bill is a former Senior Vice President of Health Dialog Services Corporation, Inc., USA and Health Dialog, UK. He also was Director of Media Development at Harvard Business School, and former Executive Producer, WGBH-TV(PBS), Boston. An Emmy award winner for his television writing and producing and a designer of award-winning patient medical decision aid booklets and DVDs, he brings a unique and valued skill set to our team. We welcome his in-put. We are also grateful to all of you for your guidance and for your availability to assist us in specific ways.
Here as an update since the last News Note of our three activities to evolve the science of patient care:
1. Completed the chapter for a book: Livingstone, J B, Gaffney, J (2013). IFS and Health Coaching: A New Model of Behavior Change and Medical Decision Making, in Internal Family Systems Therapy: Versatility in Application. Sweezy, M. and Ziskind, E, Eds., London: Routledge Pub. (in press)
2. Working on a book devoted to medical care, draft title is:
EMOTIONS, RELATIONSHIPS, AND HEALTH CARE REFORM - A Manual for Patients and their Health Professionals
3. Established a project to develop print, video and internet materials which go beyond the telling of parents and teachers what they should be doing with children to foster their healthy development. Our intention, is to go beyond “the knowing what to do” by helping parents and teachers to actually acquire the relational skills and knowledge to foster sound development in children by also working with the hidden forces which often hold teachers and parents back from doing what they intend and using what they know.
We invite you to learn more about our integrated science of health care delivery and to experience our approach within your context.
© Gaffney and Livingstone 2012
Consultants to health providers, organizations, businesses, and NGO's worldwide.
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February-March 2009. Our continuing experience applying the newest neurobiological and psychological concepts to health care shows:
There has been a need to develop patient decisions aids (print, DVD, and CD interactive materials) which embrace current psychological concepts about decision-making and about relationship dynamics between patients, family members, and their providers. The advantage for medicine to have several models of decision-making in this young science is that they can be subjected to evidence-based research which compares the efficacy of different specific approaches against controls using random approaches.
Toward this end, our multidisciplinary group has been developing a relational model of evidence-based medical decision-making which addresses the gaps mentioned above. We think this new model makes sense given current knowledge in neurobiology and relationship psychology. We expect that all those approaches that apply this relational model will improve medical care and wellness programs and lower costs better than those using some other concepts or none at all. This remains to be seen. The model indicates educational content for medical schools and all health practitioners regarding patient centered care and wellness programs.
We invite you to learn more about our integrated science of health care delivery and to experience our approach within your context.
© Gaffney and Livingstone 2009
Consultants to health providers, organizations, businesses, and NGO's worldwide.
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January 2009. Our continuing experience applying the newest neurobiological and psychological concepts indicates that:
In these challenging times of budget trimming, global competition and change, there are advantages for corporations to add new scientific system-based understandings about their “internal” corporate dynamics to traditional business models. It is a small investment for a big impact.
Stress within management and staff usually reduces team work, productivity, and creativity just when they are needed the most. The traditional models, including what is called “organizational theory”, appears to be too narrow a perspective than would be possible if current scientific concepts of mind functions and interpersonal dynamics were applied to strategies of down-sizing staff and condensing functions. Companies are finding that when we have helped to assess and strategize about their corporate communication dynamics, our process often points the way to surprisingly quick, novel, and powerful solutions to reduce stress and increase creativity and productivity.
Our approach is not cookie-cutter, questionnaire-based, or a fixed package of workshops and workbooks based on one or two models. We use a broad integrated, multimodal approach and our considerable interviewing skills to conduct a sensitive, individualized non-judgmental assessment. This includes evaluating accurately the objectives of various people in the system, their style of working and relating, and their understanding of their own role as compared to how others see them. We identify and enhance awareness of unspoken agendas and assumptions. We pull together a comprehensive understanding, convey it to management, indicate options of value to you, and offer to facilitate changes by providing a periodic perspective which supports your on-going approach.
We invite you to learn more about our integrated science of health care delivery and to experience our approach within your context.
© Gaffney and Livingstone 2009
Consultants to health providers, organizations, businesses, and NGO's worldwide.
Contact information
October-November 2008. Our continuing experience applying the newest neurobiological and psychological concepts to health care shows:
A major cause for failures in the delivery of health care and for overly high costs, despite proven clinical methods, is an "implementation bottle neck", says J.Y. Kim, M.D., at Harvard School of Public Health. One well-known cause of this implementation bottle neck is a fragmented health system infrastructure.
We have discovered another. We call it the Interpersonal Bottle Neck in Health Care Delivery™. This aspect is characterized by repeating attempts to engage patients to shift their health-related behaviors using ineffective and costly methods. Current developments in neurobiology and in treatments for eating disorders and psychic trauma have filled big gaps in understanding behavior change. Gaffney & Livingstone has filled one of those gaps with the concept that sub-personality dynamics is a crucial determinate of health-related behavior.
To know how the sub-personality parts function when people are feeling vulnerable about their health helps to open the costly interpersonal bottle neck in health care. The nursing informatics people at Cerner Corporation and at Partners Health Care have become more aware that despite the technological expansion of electronic recording sharing, what remains strategically pivotal is valid in-put about "who the patient is who has the disease". The latter is often a limiting weak link. Gaffney and Livingstone has developed new methods for providers to discover "who" the patient is on dimensions which are relevant to prevention and to the care of their "disease". We have designed education and training programs on this topic for providers, administrators, coaches, policy-makers, and researchers.
Increased research and training in the interpersonal dimensions of health care must become part of the development of a new "science of health care". "Individual behavior drives today's healthcare environment." Michael Thompson, Principal with Price, Waterhouse, Coopers.
We invite you to learn more about our integrated science of health care delivery and to experience our approach within your context.
© Gaffney and Livingstone 2008
Consultants to health providers, organizations, businesses, and NGO's worldwide.
Contact information
September 2008. Our continuing experience applying the newest neurobiological and psychological concepts to health care shows:
that it is improbable that health care providers, coaches, and wellness programs can effect significant behavior change and impart useable information to patients if they are not skilled in "The Emotional and Cognitive Terrain of Sub-personality"™ which are activated by health issues. These same skills also help to lower professional stress levels and make it easier to integrate care, be brief, reduce costs, establish a sustained alliance, involve the family, finish up, and follow through.
We invite you to learn more about our integrated science and to experience our approach within your context.
© Gaffney and Livingstone 2008
Consultants to health providers, organizations, businesses, and NGO’s worldwide.
Contact information
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