Complexity And Healthcare: An Introduction

This book illustrates the relevance of chaos and complexity theory to healthcare organizations, public health, clinical governance and the consultation. It explains the terms and ideas at the heart of complexity, the unfamiliar science behind it, and how it applies to the real world. In healthcare, the NHS is a complex adaptive system. So are hospitals, general practices, diseases and patients. The book describes how insights from complexity can help us better understand how organisations, patients or disease develop over time, in an often unpredictable manner. Contributors set out the benefits of applying complexity to their own particular areas of healthcare. This book should be of special interest to clinicians and managers in primary and secondary care, researchers and academics, and in particular, general practitioners and public health professionals.