Books
Suchman AL, Botelho RJ, Hinton-Walker P (1998). Partnerships in Healthcare: Transforming Relational Process.(Eds.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.
This highly readable book is about relationships in health care. The authors describe physician-patient relationships and the relationships that should exist among caregivers so they can more effectively care for patients and communities. This book is written by a multidisciplinary team and offers a cogent argument for why an interdisciplinary team is the key to successful healthcare. It provides compelling examples of successful partnerships, collaborative family health care, spiritual care, as well as bias in physician-patient relationships, and shared decision making.
Senge, P. (2006). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday Publishing, Random House.
This book provides the knowledge for organizations to transform rigid hierarchies into more fluid and responsive systems. According to Senge "learning organizations are those organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together." The book describes five disciplines of the learning organizations, the "learning disabilities" that hamstring organizations and eleven laws that can be used as guides for learning organizations to avoid these traps.
Collins, C. H. (2001). Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers Inc.
This book addresses a single question: Can a good company become a great company, and if so, how? Based on years of research he and his team identified the companies that made the leap from Good To Great and examined the transition point. What characteristics did the Good To Great companies have that their industry counterparts did not? Good to Great shows that greatness is not primarily a function of circumstance; but largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.
Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Dr. Kotter believes that many organizations fail at change because they fail to take a holistic approach to see change through. In this book, he offers a practical approach to an organized means of leading, not managing, change. An eight-stage process of change is presented with examples that demonstrate how to implement each stage.
Suchman, A., Sluyter, D. J., Williamson, P. R. (2011). Leading Change in Healthcare: Transforming organizations using complexity, positive psychology, and relationship-centered care. London: Radcliffe Publishing.
The book presents relationship-centered administration—an effective new evidence-based alternative to traditional culture change methodologies. It integrates fresh insights and methods from complexity science, positive psychology, and relationship-centered care, enabling a more spontaneous and reflective approach to change management. This fosters greater organizational awareness and real participation, as well as improved productivity and creativity, as well as staff recruitment and retention. Case studies are drawn from primary care, hospitals, long-term care, professional education, international NGOs and other settings, rather than emphasizing the end results, are demonstrations of how to apply relationship-centered administration in everyday practice.The book includes exercises for groups or teams to build philosophy into real life.