Back to Results
Cover image of Dying and Living in the Neighborhood
Cover image of Dying and Living in the Neighborhood
Share this Title:

Dying and Living in the Neighborhood

A Street-Level View of America’s Healthcare Promise

Prabhjot Singh, MD, PhD

Publication Date
Binding Type

Have neighborhoods been left out of the seismic healthcare reform efforts to connect struggling Americans with the help they need?

Even as US spending on healthcare skyrockets, impoverished Americans continue to fall ill and die of preventable conditions. Although the majority of health outcomes are shaped by non-medical factors, public and private healthcare reform efforts have largely ignored the complex local circumstances that make it difficult for struggling men, women, and children to live healthier lives. In Dying and Living in the Neighborhood, Dr. Prabhjot Singh argues that we must...

Have neighborhoods been left out of the seismic healthcare reform efforts to connect struggling Americans with the help they need?

Even as US spending on healthcare skyrockets, impoverished Americans continue to fall ill and die of preventable conditions. Although the majority of health outcomes are shaped by non-medical factors, public and private healthcare reform efforts have largely ignored the complex local circumstances that make it difficult for struggling men, women, and children to live healthier lives. In Dying and Living in the Neighborhood, Dr. Prabhjot Singh argues that we must look beyond the walls of the hospital and into the neighborhoods where patients live and die to address the troubling rise in chronic disease.

Building on his training as a physician in Harlem, Dr. Singh draws from research in sociology and economics to look at how our healthcare systems are designed and how the development of technologies like the Internet enable us to rethink strategies for assembling healthier neighborhoods. In part I, Singh presents the story of Ray, a patient whose death illuminated how he had lived, his neighborhood context, and the forces that accelerated his decline. In part II, Singh introduces nationally recognized pioneers who are acting on the local level to build critical components of a neighborhood-based health system. In the process, he encounters a movement of people and organizations with similar visions of a porous, neighborhood-embedded healthcare system. Finally, in part III he explores how civic technologies may help forge a new set of relationships among healthcare, public health, and community development.

Every rising public health leader, frontline clinician, and policymaker in the country should read this book to better understand how they can contribute to a more integrated and supportive healthcare system.

Reviews

Reviews

... Singh's thesis merits discussion for anyone interested in curing a sick health care system.

As Singh pulls together the moving pieces—the neighborhood, the health care sector, community organizations, and government—into a vision of how to "integrate the whole," it seems feasible that anchoring our health to our neighborhood will bring the kind of well-being, humanity, and equity that we can afford, and that we deserve.

A path-breaking book sure to redirect inquiry in the United States on how to repair our broken health care system. While economists and politicians have suggested countless ways to tinker with the overpriced and underperforming system, Singh offers a much deeper, nuanced, and humane diagnosis of the problems. This book will stir major new thinking and creative approaches towards a more effective and decent U.S. health care system.

In this sorely needed book, Singh takes a supremely unique approach, imbuing the subject of population health with a personal story to convincingly argue that healthcare needs to build from the community out to the medical sector rather than from the hospital in. Anyone in healthcare will want to read this essential book. An incredible and absolutely riveting read.

In many nations with few resources, models linking health services to communities are well developed. Except for scattered examples, the US system is largely disconnected from neighborhoods and their problems. With penetrating analysis and compelling storytelling, Prabhjot Singh calls for connecting our system to people and their neighborhoods, almost quite literally turning it on its head.

See All Reviews
About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
312
ISBN
9781421420448
Illustration Description
1 b&w illus
Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Part I
Chapter 1: Out of Many, One
Chapter 2: Heads in Beds
Chapter 3: Mending Wall
Chapter 4: Contexts of Consequence
Part II
Chapter 5: The Value of Being Connected
Chapter 6: Blessed

Preface
Introduction
Part I
Chapter 1: Out of Many, One
Chapter 2: Heads in Beds
Chapter 3: Mending Wall
Chapter 4: Contexts of Consequence
Part II
Chapter 5: The Value of Being Connected
Chapter 6: Blessed are the Organized
Chapter 7: Coach Culture
Chapter 8: The Center Cannot Hold
Part III
Chapter 9: From Organizations to Integrators
Chapter 10: SCALE at the Speed of Relationships
Chapter 11: Total Population Health
Chapter 12: Laying the Groundwork
Acknowledgements
Index

Author Bio
Prabhjot Singh, MD, PhD
Featured Contributor

Prabhjot Singh, MD, PhD

Prabhjot Singh, MD, PHD, is the director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health and chairman of the Department of Health System Design & Global Health at the Mount Sinai Health System. He is also the special advisor for design and strategy for the Peterson Center on Healthcare.