The planning and design of healthcare facilities has evolved over the previous decades from "e;function follows design"e; to "e;design follows function."e; Facilities stressed the functions of healthcare providers but patient experience was not fully considered. The design process has now crucially evolved, and currently, the impression a hospital conveys to its patients and community is the primary concern. The facilities must be welcoming, comfortable, and exude a commitment to patient well-being. Rapid changes and burgeoning technologies are now major considerations in facility design. Without flexibility, hospitals face quicker obsolescence if designs are not forward-thinking. Planning and Designing Healthcare Facilities: A Lean, Innovative, and Evidence-Based Approach explores recent developments in hospital design. Medical facilities have been adapted to the requirements of clinical functions. Recently, the needs of patients and clinical pathways have been recognized. With the patient at the center of the process, the flow of tasks becomes the guiding principle as hospital design must employ evidence-based thinking, and process management methods such as Lean become central. The authors explain new concepts to reduce healthcare delivery cost, but keep quality the primary consideration. Concepts such as sustainability (i.e., Green Hospitals) and the use of new tools and technologies, such as information and communication technology (ICT), Lean, and evidence-based planning and innovations are fully explained.
Accounts of Irish racialization in the United States have tended to stress Irish difference. Famine Irish and the American Racial State takes a different stance. This interdisciplinary, transnational work uses an array of cultural artifacts, including novels, plays, songs, cartoons, government reports, laws, sermons, memoirs, and how-to manuals, to make its case. It challenges the claim that the Irish "became white" in the United States, showing that the claim fails to take into full account the legal position of the Irish in the nineteenth-century US state - a state that deemed the Irish "white" upon arrival. The Irish thus not only fitted into the US racial state; they helped to form it. Till now, little heed has been paid to the state's role in the Americanization of the Irish or to the Irish role in the development of US state institutions. Distinguishing American citizenship from American nationality, this volume journeys to California to analyze the means by which the Irish gained acceptance in both categories, at the expense of the Chinese. Along the way, it contests ideas that have taken hold within American studies. One is the notion that the Roman Catholic Church operated outside of the power structure of the nineteenth-century United States. On the contrary, Famine Irish and the American Racial State argues, the Irish-led corporate Catholic Church became deeply imbricated in US state structures. Its final chapter discusses a radical, transnational, Irish tradition that offers a glimpse at a postnational future.
