Patients As Policy Actors
Edited and with an Introduction by Beatrix Hoffman, Nancy Tomes, Rachel Grob & Mark Schlesinger
This strong volume brings together contributors of different disciplinary and experiential backgrounds, broadening our understanding of how patient voices influence American health care policy.”
- Elizabeth Toon, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Patients as Policy Actors offers groundbreaking accounts of one of the health field’s most important developments of the last fifty years—the rise of more consciously patient-centered care and policymaking. The authors in this volume illustrate, from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the unexpected ways that patients can matter as both agents and objects of health care policy yet nonetheless too often remain silent, silenced, misrepresented, or ignored. The volume concludes with a unique epilogue outlining principles for more effectively integrating patient perspectives into a pluralistic conception of policy-making. With the recent enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, patients’ and consumers’ roles in American health care require more than ever the careful analysis and attention exemplified by this innovative volume.
BEATRIX HOFFMAN is an associate professor and chair of the department of history at Northern Illinois Unversity. She is author of The Wages of Sickness: The Politics of Health Insurance in Progressive America.
NANCY TOMES is a professor in the history department at Stony Brook University. She is the author of several books, among them, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life.
RACHEL GROB is scholar in residence and director of national initiatives at the Center for Patient Partnerships, University of Wisconsin-Madison and healthy advocacy faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College. She is author of Testing Baby: The Transformation of Newborn Screening, Parenting, and Policymaking (Rutgers Press, forthcoming).
MARK SCHLESINGER is a visiting scholar at the Center for Patient Partnerships and a professor of health policy and a fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University and past editor of the Journal of Health Policy, Politics and Law.