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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Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Health inequality has reached a crisis point. Your income or hometown can have a devastating impact on how well and how long you live. This injustice, exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, continues as the cost of living rises and other sources of inequity grow. What can be done to make things better?
This book, written by the authors behind the award-winning The Unequal Pandemic, explores successful international case studies of governments reducing health inequalities – from the USA and Brazil to Germany and England – stretching over fifty years from the 1960s to the 2000s.
Essential reading for students and scholars of public health and the social sciences, and for health and social care professionals and policy makers, this book demonstrates that reducing health inequalities is possible and provides a roadmap for today’s governments to follow.
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.
Dementia is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. Responding to the global dementia challenge, however, affects more than humans alone. We live in a multi-species world but often think about dementia in mono-species ways. From the lab to the living room, other beings are “on the scene” and our relations with them affect how we understand, experience, and respond to dementia. Drawing on cutting-edge work across the social and biological sciences, this book offers readers the tools to respond to dementia in multi-species ways. By exploring a range of topics, from pathology to personhood, contributors highlight how thinking about dementia as a more-than-human phenomenon may enable new ways of responding to our global dementia challenge.
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.
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.
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.
The COVID-19 pandemic thrust fear into the heart of political debate and policy making. In the wake of the pandemic, it is critical to clarify the role of fear in these processes to avoid repeating past mistakes and to learn crucial lessons for future crises.
This book draws on case studies from across the world, including the UK, Turkey, Brazil and the US, to provide thought-provoking and practical insights into how fear and related emotions can shape politics under extraordinary and ordinary circumstances. Offering interdisciplinary perspectives from leading and emerging scholars in politics, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, the book enables a better understanding of post-pandemic politics for students, researchers and policy makers alike.
This book centres on women living with HIV in South Africa who have navigated affective relationships, activist networks, government institutions and global coalitions to transform health policies that govern access to HIV medicines. Drawing on 20 years of ethnographic and policy research in South Africa, Brazil and India, it highlights the value of understanding the embodied and political dimensions of health policy and reveals the networked threads that weave women’s precarity into the governance of technologies and the technologies of governance. It illuminates the entwined histories of health policy evolution, systemic inequality and everyday life and calls for a recognition of the embodied ramifications of democratic politics and global health governance.
By integrating medical anthropology with science studies and political theory, this book traces the history of the struggle to access HIV medicines in the Global South and brings it into the present by articulating the lessons learned by activists and policy makers engaged in shaping these vital health policies.
A public health crisis is gripping the UK. Improvements in life expectancy have stalled, health inequalities have widened, obesity and alcohol misuse are placing an increasing strain on health services and urban air pollution is now widely recognised as a serious health hazard. COVID-19 revealed the weaknesses of the UK's public health system, once thought to be among the best in the world.
Against this background, this book examines the organisational and political barriers to an effective public health system showcased through the UK. It urges that what is needed is a new social contract, in which health policy is truly public.
