JBFN Archives

Evaluating Public Health Interventions

Public health interventions include any effort or policy that attempts to improve the health among individuals or an entire population. They can be run by governmental health departments or non-governmental organisations and can include educational programmes, screening programmes, vaccination programmes, environmental improvements and health promotion campaigns. Interventions that include multiple independent or interacting components are referred to as complex. Evaluating and predicting the efficacy of any public health intervention, as well as calculating the cost effectiveness is essential.

Using examples from multiple published studies conducted around the world, this textbook shows readers how to evaluate public health interventions in real world settings. It will enable readers to understand how to investigate whether a public health intervention works, for whom, when, where, how, and why. It provides a comprehensive introduction to key areas of evaluation including understanding complex interventions, developing programme theories, community engagement in evaluation, and the main methods used in process, impact and economic evaluation. It explains how different methods can be used individually and in combination to answer different kinds of evaluation question and at different phases in an evaluation cycle and considers how the results of evaluations can be brought together to inform action.

This textbook is the ideal guide for students, practitioners and policymakers in the field of health policy and evaluation.

Managing Chronicity in Unequal States

By portraying the circumstances of people living with chronic conditions in radically different contexts, from Alzheimer’s patients in the UK to homeless people with psychiatric disorders in India, Managing Chronicity in Unequal States offers glimpses of what dealing with medically complex conditions in stratified societies means. While in some places the state regulates and intrudes on the most intimate aspects of chronic living, in others it is utterly and criminally absent. Either way, it is a present/absent actor that deeply conditions people’s opportunities and strategies of care.

This book explores how individuals, groups and communities navigate uncertain and unequal healthcare systems, in which inherent moral judgements on human worth have long-lasting effects on people’s wellbeing. This is key reading for anyone wishing to deconstruct the issues at stake when analysing how care and chronicity are entangled with multiple institutional, economic, and other circumstantial factors. How people access the available informal and formal resources as well as how they react to official diagnoses and decisions are important facets of the management of chronicity.

In the arena of care, people with chronic conditions find themselves negotiating restrictions and handling issues of power and (inter)dependency in relationships of inequality and proximity. This is particularly relevant in current times, when care has given in to the lure of the market, and the possibility of living a long and fulfilling life has been drastically reduced, transformed into a ‘reward’ for the few who have been deemed worthy of it.

Cancer and the Politics of Care

This timely volume responds to the epic impacts of cancer as a global phenomenon. Through the fine-grained lens of ethnography, the contributors present new thinking on how social, economic, race, gender and other structural inequalities intersect, compound and complicate health inequalities. Cancer experiences and impacts are explored across eleven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Senegal, the United Kingdom and the United States. The volume engages with specific cancers from the point of primary prevention, to screening, diagnosis, treatment (or its absence), and end-of-life care.

Cancer and the Politics of Care traverses new theoretical terrain through explicitly critiquing cancer interventions, their limitations and success, the politics that drive them, and their embeddedness in local cultures and value systems. It extends prior work on cancer, by incorporating the perspectives of patients and their families, ‘at risk’ groups and communities, health professionals, cancer advocates and educators, and patient navigators.
The volume advances cross-cultural understandings of care, resisting simple dichotomies between caregiving and receiving, and reveals the fraught ethics of care that must be negotiated in resource-poor settings and stratified health systems. Its diversity and innovation ensures its wide utility among those working in and studying medical anthropology, social anthropology and other fields at the intersections of social science, medicine and health equity.