Essential Values-Based Practice: Clinical Stories Linking Science with People

This book will help clinicians acquire and develop the processes and skills of values-based practice. The aim of most patient-clinician consultations is to improve health outcomes. Often they succeed, and patients are satisfied and empowered. However, some consultations are unsatisfactory and result in failure to improve health outcomes and dissatisfaction on the part of patients, carers or clinicians. When consultations fail to achieve the desired results, the cause is not usually a failure of evidence-based practice. Today's clinicians are trained in evidence-based medicine, educated, updated and appraised. The most likely reason why things go wrong is a failure of values-based practice – not ascertaining the relevant values perspectives and acting on them in a coherent and purposeful manner. If you rehearse and practise the elements of values-based practice detailed in this book, you will find your consultations more personally rewarding and your patients are likely to derive more benefit.

K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health in the University of Warwick Medical School, Fellow of St Cross College and Member of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford. Between 2005 and 2011 he was Special Advisor for Values-based Practice to the Department of Health.

Edward Peile is Emeritus Professor of Medical Education in the University of Warwick Medical School. A Fellow of three medical Royal Colleges, he was awarded the President's Medal of the Academy of Medical Educators in 2009 for his lifetime contribution to medical education.

Heidi Carroll is a General Practitioner in Aberdeenshire, UK.