John Launer – författare

This book provides an important contribution to the new and growing field of ‘narrative-based medicine’. It specifically addresses the largest area of medical activity, primary care. It provides both a theoretical framework and practical skills for dealing with individual consultations, family work, clinical supervision and teamwork, and offers a comprehensive approach to the whole range of work in primary care. Using a wide range of clinical examples, it shows how professionals in primary care can help clarify patients’ existing stories, and elucidate new stories. It can be used as a training resource and includes exercises and summaries of key points to consider. It is based on, and describes, an established evaluated training method, and is of immediate and significant practical use to readers. It is essential reading for general practitioners, practice nurses and others in the primary care team, psychologists, family therapists, counsellors and other professionals attached to primary care. GP trainers, tutors and course organisers will find it a valuable educational tool. Professionals elsewhere in primary care such as pharmacists, dentists and optometrists, and academics in medical sociology and medical anthropology will also find it very useful.

Narrative-Based Practice in Health and Social Care outlines a vision of how witnessing narratives, paying attention to them, and developing an ability to question them creatively, can make the person’s emerging story the central focus of health and social care, and of healing.

This text gives an account of the practical application of ideas and skills from contemporary narrative studies to health and social care. Promoting narrative-based practice in everyday encounters with patients and clients, and in supervision, teaching, teamwork and management, it presents "Conversations Inviting Change," an established narrative-based model of interactional skills.

Underpinned by an account of theory from narrative studies and related fields, including communication theory and systems thinking, it is written for students and practitioners across a broad range of professions in primary and secondary health care and social care.

More information about "Conversations Inviting Change" is available at www.conversationsinvitingchange.com. This website includes podcasts, presentations and further teaching material as well as details of forthcoming courses, and is continually updated with information about the approach described in this book.

Narrative-Based Practice in Health and Social Care outlines a vision of how witnessing narratives, paying attention to them, and developing an ability to question them creatively, can make the person’s emerging story the central focus of health and social care, and of healing.

This text gives an account of the practical application of ideas and skills from contemporary narrative studies to health and social care. Promoting narrative-based practice in everyday encounters with patients and clients, and in supervision, teaching, teamwork and management, it presents "Conversations Inviting Change," an established narrative-based model of interactional skills.

Underpinned by an account of theory from narrative studies and related fields, including communication theory and systems thinking, it is written for students and practitioners across a broad range of professions in primary and secondary health care and social care.

More information about "Conversations Inviting Change" is available at www.conversationsinvitingchange.com. This website includes podcasts, presentations and further teaching material as well as details of forthcoming courses, and is continually updated with information about the approach described in this book.

The Power of Colleagues

What happens when primary care clinicians meet together on set aside time in their practice settings to talk about their own patients? 

.....Complimenting quality metrics or performance measures through discussing the actual stories of individual patients and their clinician-patient relationships

In these settings, how can clinicians pool their collective experience and apply that to ‘the evidence’ for an individual patient?

.....Especially for patients who do not fit the standard protocols and have vague and worrisome symptoms, poor response to treatment, unpredictable disease courses, and/or compromised abilities for shared decision making

What follows when discussion about individual patients reveals system-wide service gaps and coordination limitations?

.....Particularly for patients with complex clinical problems that fall outside performance monitors and quality screens

How can collaborative engagement of case-based uncertainties with one’s colleagues help combat the loneliness and helplessness that PCPs can experience, no matter what model or setting in which they practice?

.....And where they are expected to practice coordinated, evidence-based, EMR-directed care

These questions inspired Lucia Sommers and John Launer and their international contributors to explore the power of colleagues in “Clinical Uncertainty in Primary Care: The Challenge of Collaborative Engagement” and offer antidotes to sub-optimal care that can result when clinicians go it alone. 

From the Foreword: “Lucia Sommers and John Launer, with the accompanying input of their contributing authors, have done a deeply insightful and close-to-exhaustive job of defining clinical uncertainty. They identify its origins, components and subtypes; demonstrate the ways in which and the extent to which it is intrinsic to medicine…and they present a cogent case for its special relationship to primary care practice…‘Clinical Uncertainty in Primary Care’ not only presents a model of collegial collaboration and support, it also implicitly legitimates it.’’ Renee Fox, Annenberg Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences, University of Pennsylvania.

This book provides an important contribution to the new and growing field of ‘narrative-based medicine’. It specifically addresses the largest area of medical activity, primary care. It provides both a theoretical framework and practical skills for dealing with individual consultations, family work, clinical supervision and teamwork, and offers a comprehensive approach to the whole range of work in primary care. Using a wide range of clinical examples, it shows how professionals in primary care can help clarify patients’ existing stories, and elucidate new stories. It can be used as a training resource and includes exercises and summaries of key points to consider. It is based on, and describes, an established evaluated training method, and is of immediate and significant practical use to readers. It is essential reading for general practitioners, practice nurses and others in the primary care team, psychologists, family therapists, counsellors and other professionals attached to primary care. GP trainers, tutors and course organisers will find it a valuable educational tool. Professionals elsewhere in primary care such as pharmacists, dentists and optometrists, and academics in medical sociology and medical anthropology will also find it very useful.