Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
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This book traces the origins of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in the broader context of universalism since the beginning of the 20th century.
UHC aims to improve access to essential health services, provide financial protection and overcome health care inequities.
Drawing on rich first-hand data, including expert interviews and archival research, this book adopts a historical-sociological methodology to analyse some of UHC’s key political dynamics: consensus, conflicts, negotiations and struggles. It reveals that UHC is the result of a unique conjoining of movements in health, debates on human rights and concerns with development in a particular world context across the global North and global South.
In a world facing multiple intersecting crises, the push for healthier, more resilient societies has never been more urgent. This timely book reveals how empowered and organised communities can lead this change. It offers policy makers, academics and activists research-driven insights, decolonial perspectives and real-world examples of organising and collective actions from across the global North and South.
By centring on the power of community development, participation and social movements, the book delivers actionable frameworks to tackle inequality and advance the right to health, making it an essential resource for anyone committed to health justice and for building equitable and sustainable health systems worldwide.
Young people’s mental health is in crisis, with many – especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds – struggling academically and with the later transition to employment. Feeling excluded, many young people turn to harmful behaviours, such as vaping and alcohol use, for escape and a sense of belonging.
Schools are increasingly expected to address these issues but often lack the time and expertise to do so effectively. Based on the author’s research, including the successful ‘Learning Together’ trial – an innovative programme that improved mental health, reduced bullying and raised academic achievement – this book provides a blueprint for a fundamental shift in how schools support young people.
Essential reading for teachers, public health workers and policy makers tackling the health and educational inequalities affecting young people today.
In this book, Sally King interrogates the diagnostic label of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) to expose and challenge sexist assumptions within medical research and practice. She powerfully demonstrates how the concept of the ‘hormonal’ premenstrual woman is merely the latest iteration of the ‘hysterical’ female myth. By blaming the healthy reproductive body (first our wombs, now our hormones) for the female-prevalence of emotional distress and physical pain, gender myths appear to have trumped all empirical evidence to the contrary.
The book also provides a primer on menstrual physiology beyond hormones, and a short history of how hormonal metaphors came to dominate medical and popular discourses. The author calls for clinicians, researchers, educators, and activists to help improve women’s health without unintentionally reproducing damaging stereotypes.
Life expectancy is about more than just health – it’s about the kind of society we live in. And in the early 2010s, after decades of continual improvement, life expectancy in the UK, USA and many other rich countries stopped increasing. For millions of people it actually declined. Despite hundreds of thousands of extra deaths, governments and officials remained silent.
Combining robust evidence with real-life stories, this book tells the story of how austerity policies caused this scandal. It argues that this shocking and tragic suffering was predictable, caused by a dereliction of duty from those in power.
The book concludes with an optimistic vision of what can be done to restore life expectancy improvements and reduce health inequalities.
From SARS to Zika, and Ebola to COVID-19, epidemics and pandemics have become increasingly prevalent in recent years. Each outbreak presents new challenges but the responses are often similar.
This important book explores the dimensions, dynamics and implications of emerging pandemic societies. Drawing on ideas from sociology and science and technology studies, it sheds new light on how pandemics are socially produced and, in turn, shape societies in areas such as governance, work and recreation, science and technology, education, and family life. It offers pointers to the future of pandemic societies, including the expansion of technologies of surveillance and control, as well as the prospects of social renewal created by economic and social disruption.
Are you a health and social care commissioner navigating the ever-changing commissioning landscape? With challenges such as limited funding, changing demands and global pandemics, we need to be clear on why, what and how we commission effectively.
This book offers you a warm welcome into the often-complex world of healthcare commissioning. Amanda J. Hughes shares personal insights from her commissioning career and practical guidance that will demystify the commissioning cycle and ease the journey as you strive to achieve the best outcomes for the population.
This book will help you to ensure valuable resources are directed to those with most need, that care is fair and accessible and that the solutions you put into place are sustainable for the longer term.
Questions as to the mental capacity of an individual to consent to sex are an increasingly important aspect of legal scholarship and professional practice for those working in care. Recent case law has added new layers of complexity, requiring that a person must be able to understand that the other person needs to consent and can withdraw that consent. While this has been welcomed for asserting the importance of the interpersonal dynamics of sex, it has significant implications for practice and for the day-to-day lives of people with cognitive impairments.
This collection brings together academics, practitioners and organisations to consider the challenges posed by the current legal framework, and future directions for law, policy and practice.
Healthcare for transgender people is in crisis. Many of the problems stem from bureaucracies within the health system, limiting conceptualizations of sex and gender, and the requirement for a diagnosis of ‘gender dysphoria’.
This book presents a unique argument for full demedicalization of transness as a crucial step towards removing existing barriers to good healthcare. Resisting the current norm of separating sex and gender, it also argues for an understanding of them as necessarily interlinked and co-constructed.
By elevating trans voices and experiences, this book offers a new perspective on transness, medicalization and research methodologies to help trans people, practitioners and policy makers better understand the barriers faced by trans people when seeking healthcare.
Can society be healthy, and how? Is Britain a ‘healthy society’ in the 21st century?
When people ponder health, they usually consider the health of the individual, but individuals co-exist in a social environment so attention should be placed on the health of communities and populations.
Re-examining health, healthcare and societal health using the latest data and research, this book provides a clear, accessible account of the current state of play. Addressing definitions of health in individuals, communities and populations, definitions of society itself, changes in health over time and the contribution of healthcare to health and longevity, it also suggests ways of effectively tackling obstacles to improving health and healthcare in 21st century Britain.
