Research

 

You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive of over 1500 titles.

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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Flexible Boundaries
Editor:

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made unpaid care more visible through its absence, while also increasing the need for it.

Drawing on a range of research projects covering Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US, this book documents a broad spectrum of unpaid work performed by residents, relatives, volunteers and staff in nursing homes.

It demonstrates how boundaries between paid and unpaid work are flexible, varying considerably with conditions, time, place and intersectional populations.

By examining the complex labour process within nursing homes, this book provides insight and understanding which will be critical in planning for nursing home care post-pandemic.

Open access
Practices of Care and Contestation

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

What does it mean to love a healthcare system?

It is often claimed that the UK population is unusually attached to its National Health Service and the last decade has seen increasingly visible displays of gratitude and love. While social surveys of public attitudes measure how much Britain loves the NHS, this book mobilises new empirical research to ask how Britain loves its NHS.

The answer delves into a series of public practices – such as campaigning, donating and volunteering within NHS organisations – and investigates how attitudes to the NHS shape patient experience of healthcare. Stewart argues that these should be understood as practices of care for, and contestation about the future of, the healthcare system.

This book offers a timely critique of both the potential, and the dysfunctions, of Britain’s complex love affair with the NHS.

Open access
Lessons from the Crisis of Western Liberalism

What part do the values of growth and prosperity, freedom and justice, security and democracy play in social policy and human welfare? How can we judge the policies offered to us as the recipe for progress?

At a time of global ‘permacrisis’, Sebastian Taylor applies his extensive frontline experience working with health systems and healthcare in the Global North and South to assess the concrete impact of contemporary liberal values on our welfare, development and environmental survival.

Drawing on research from around the world, he uses health as an objective metric to assess how effective these policies are for individuals and society as a whole.

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Conceptualizing Gender Protection Gaps in Latin America

Focusing on the flight of women and girls from Venezuela, this book examines the gendered nature of forced displacement and the ways in which the failures of protection regimes to be sensitive to displacement’s gendered character affect women and girls, and their sexual and reproductive health.

Highlighting how categorical legal distinctions between ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants’ fail to capture the dynamics of forced migration in Latin America, it investigates how the operation of this categorical divide generates responsibility and protection gaps in relation to female forced migrants which act as determinants of sexual and reproductive health. Drawing on the voices of displaced women, it argues that a robust political ethics of protection of the forcibly displaced must encompass all necessary fleers and be responsive to the gendered character of forced displacement and particularly to effective access to sexual and reproductive health rights.

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ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

How can public services and social interventions create and sustain good outcomes for the populations they serve?

Building on research in public health, social epidemiology and the social determinants of health, this book presents complexity theory as an alternative basis for an outcome-oriented public management praxis. It takes a critical approach towards New Public Management and provides new conceptual inroads for reappraising public management in theory and practice. It advances two practical approaches: Human Learning Systems (a model for public service reform) and Learning Partnerships (a model for research and academic engagement in complex settings).

With up-to-date and extensive discussions on public service reform, this book provides practical and action-oriented guidance for a radical change of course in management and governance.

Open access
Improving Health and Wellbeing

Health and wellbeing are significantly influenced by how professionals plan, design and manage the environment.

This book supports those working in the built environment and public health sectors, with the knowledge and insight to maximise health improvement through planning and land use decisions. Supported by examples of policy and approaches, it focuses on implementation and delivery, and sets out what is needed to achieve healthier environments within the parameters of legislative and policy frameworks.

It demonstrates how when we harness the art and science of public health spatial planning, can we begin to effect changes to the policies and decisions that shape population health.

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A Comparative Study of England and Canada

This timely comparative study assesses the role of medical doctors in reforming publicly funded health services in England and Canada.

Respected authors from health and legal backgrounds on both sides of the Atlantic consider how the high status of the profession uniquely influences reforms. With summaries of developments in models of care, and the participation of doctors since the inception of publicly funded healthcare systems, they ask whether professionals might be considered allies or enemies of policy-makers.

With insights for future health policy and research, the book is an important contribution to debates about the complex relationship between doctors and the systems in which they practice.

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Health services are among the most expensive and complex areas of social policy.

Using qualitative comparative analysis to explore 11 developed countries’ health services, this volume considers the links between a range of different outcome measures and levels of funding, social determinants and different types of health expenditures. It also reflects on how those systems responded to the first wave of COVID-19.

This ambitious text identifies which underpinning factors are associated with the strongest outcomes, providing a rigorous account of health systems and health policies in the context of their wider economies and societies.

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Legal Responses to COVID-19 – Justice and Social Responsibility
Editors: and

The effects of COVID-19 are visited disproportionately on the already disadvantaged.

This important text maps out ways in which those already disadvantaged have been affected by legal responses to COVID-19. Contributors tackle issues including virtual trials, adult social care, racism, tax and spending, education and more. They reflect on the implications of COVID-19 and express concerns with policy and practice developments and with the neutral version of the law and the economy which has taken root.

Drawing on diverse resources, this text offers an account of the damage caused by legal responses to the pandemic and demonstrates how the future response can be positive and productive.

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The Privatisation of Adult Social Care in England
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Adult social care was the first major social policy domain in England to be transferred from the state to the market. There is now a forty-year period to look back at to consider the thinking behind the strategy, the impacts on commissioners and providers of care, on the care workforce and on those who use care and support services.

In this book, Bob Hudson meticulously charts these shifts. He challenges the dominant market paradigm, explores alternative models for a post-Covid-19 future and locates the debate within the wider literature on political thinking and policy change.

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