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Health profession education has evolved to incorporate didactic instruction and experiential learning opportunities over time. Constructivism and interprofessional education are essential theoretical concepts that have shaped modern health profession education. However, transformative active learning is an approach that is particularly well suited to the needs of healthcare professionals. By integrating theoretical knowledge with practical skills, transformative active learning helps prepare students for the complex challenges they will face in their future careers and encourages them to become agents of change committed to improving healthcare practice. Saudi National Institute of Health (Saudi NIH) is one of the Ministry of Health's initiatives in the National Transformation Program 2020 to achieve the Kingdom's Vision 2030, as it supports biomedical research in the health sector in Saudi Arabia. One of the mandates of Saudi NIH is to build the research capacity through well-designed educational and training programs through the directory of education and research skills adopting active learning strategies. This chapter aims to communicate the methodological framework of the Education and Research Skills Directory of the SNIH for integrating active learning in the various training programs and initiatives aiming to promote the core learning capabilities with excellence, diversity, diversity, uniqueness, competency, and efficiency values.

Researchers continue to seek understanding of industrialization as a state managed process. How to create and implement new industries based on advanced knowledge is on the policy agenda of many advanced nations. Measures that promote these developments include national capacity building in science and technology, the formation of technology transfer systems, and the establishment of industrial clusters. What these templates often overlook is an analysis of use. This chapter aims to increase the understanding of the processes that embed new solutions in structures from an industrial network perspective. The chapter describes an empirical study of high-technology industrialization in Taiwan that the researcher conducts to this end. The study shows that the Taiwanese industrial model is oversimplified and omits several important factors in the development of new industries. This study bases its findings on the notions that resource combination occurs in different time and space, the new always builds on existing resource structures, and the users are important as active participants in development processes.

Underrepresented in medicine individuals have historically been discouraged to consider surgical subspecialties and instead encouraged toward primary care fields thus representing less than 2% of the workforce in these areas. In the last 15 years, the Rabb-Venable Excellence in Research program has worked with medical students, residents, and fellows in preparing them to become ophthalmologists, medical researchers, academicians, or private practice. While the Rabb-Venable program centers on expanding the number of ophthalmologists, pipeline programs exist to enhance the representation of URM individuals in other medical specialties to decrease health disparities.

This chapter discusses the Rabb-Venable program, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the sponsorship of the National Medical Association (NMA), has combined a research competition at the annual meeting of the NMA. The Rabb-Venable program is geared toward increasing the number of (URM) in the field of ophthalmology and increasing the number of URM participants in academic medicine. The program has a twofold mission of supporting the development of the clinical specialty of ophthalmology and creating physician researchers through leadership, academic excellence, professionalism, service, and mentorship. Exploration of the different types of eye diseases that disproportionally affect minority groups are identified. In addition the medical students who have been part of the program and are eligible to apply have had an 84% rate of matching in ophthalmology.

The research analyzes good practices in health care “management experimentation models,” which fall within the broader range of the integrative public–private partnerships (PPPs). Introduced by the Italian National Healthcare System in 1991, the “management experimentation models” are based on a public governance system mixed with a private management approach, a patient-centric orientation, a shared financial risk, and payment mechanisms correlated with clinical outcomes, quality, and cost-savings. This model makes public hospitals more competitive and efficient without affecting the principles of universal coverage, solidarity, and equity of access, but requires higher financial responsibility for managers and more flexibility in operations.

In Italy the experience of such experimental models is limited but successful. The study adopts the case study methodology and refers to the international collaboration started in 1997 between two Italian hospitals and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC – Pennsylvania, USA) in the field of organ transplants and biomedical advanced therapies.

The research allows identifying what constitutes good management practices and factors associated with higher clinical performance. Thus, it allows to understand whether and how the management experimentation model can be implemented on a broader basis, both nationwide and internationally. However, the implementation of integrative PPPs requires strategic, cultural, and managerial changes in the way in which a hospital operates; these transformations are not always sustainable.

The recognition of ISMETT’s good management practices is useful for competitive benchmarking among hospitals specialized in organ transplants and for its insights on the strategies concerning the governance reorganization in the hospital setting. Findings can be used in the future for analyzing the cross-country differences in productivity among well-managed public hospitals.

This chapter explores the rise in genetic approaches to health disparities at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Analysis of public health policies, genome project records, ethnography of project leaders and leading genetic epidemiologists, and news coverage of international projects demonstrates how the study of health disparities and genetic causes of health simultaneously took hold just as the new field of genomics and matters of racial inequality became a global priority for biomedical science and public health.

As the U.S. federal government created policies to implement racial inclusion standards, international genome projects seized the study race, and diseases that exhibit disparities by race. Genomic leaders made health disparities research a central feature of their science. However, recent attempts to move toward analysis of gene-environment interactions in health and disease have proven insufficient in addressing sociological contributors to health disparities. In place of in-depth analyses of environmental causes, pharmacogenomics drugs, diagnostics, and inclusion in sequencing projects have become the frontline solutions to health disparities.

The chapter argues that genetic forms of medicalization and racialization have taken hold over science and public health around the world, thereby engendering a divestment from sociological approaches that do not align with the expansion of genomic science. The chapter thus contributes to critical discussions in the social and health sciences about the fundamental processes of medicalization, racialization, and geneticization in contemporary society.

The following is an introductory profile of the fastest growing firms over the three-year period of the study listed by corporate reputation ranking order. The business activities in which the firms are engaged are outlined to provide background information for the reader.

Several decades of mental health research in the UK repeatedly report that people of African-Caribbean origin are more likely than other ethnic minorities, including the White majority, to be diagnosed with schizophrenia and related psychoses. Race-based inequalities in mental healthcare persist despite numerous initiatives such as the UK’s ‘Delivering Race Equality’ policy, which sought to reduce the fear of mainstream services and promote more timely access to care. Community-level engagement with members of African-Caribbean communities highlighted the need to develop culturally relevant psychosocial treatments. Family Intervention (FI) is a ‘talking treatment’ with a strong evidence-base for clinical-effectiveness in the management of psychoses. Benefits of FI include improved self-care, problem-solving and coping for both service users and carers, reducing the risk of relapse and re-hospitalisation. Working collaboratively with African-Caribbeans as ‘experts-by-experience’ enabled co-production, implementation and evaluation of Culturally adapted Family Intervention (CaFI). Our findings suggests that a community frequently labelled ‘hard-to-reach’ can be highly motivated to engage in solutions-focussed research to improve engagement, experiences and outcomes in mental health. This underscores the UK’s Mental Health Task Force’s message that ‘new ways of working’ are required to reduce the inequalities faced by African-Caribbeans and other marginalised groups in accessing mental healthcare. Although conducted in the UK (a high-income multi-cultural country), co-production of more culturally appropriate psychosocial interventions may have wider implications in the global health context. Interventions like CaFI could, for example, contribute to reducing the 75% ‘mental health gap’ between High and Low-and-Middle-Income counties reported by the World Health Organization.

Purpose – Although the US has lagged behind international developments in health technology assessment (HTA), renewed interest in HTA in the US has been fueled by the appropriation of $1.1 billion comparative effectiveness research (CER) in 2009 and the debate over health care reform.

Approach – To inform CER practices in the US, we present case studies of HTA from England/Wales and Germany: contrasting methods; relevance to the US; and impact on innovation.

Findings – The National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) was established in 1999 to inform trusts within the National Health Service of England and Wales. It uses cost-effectiveness analysis to guide the allocation resource across preventative and curative interventions. In Germany, the Institut für Qualität und Wirtschaftlichkeit im Gesundheitswesen (IQWiG) was established in 2004 to inform reimbursement and pricing policies for the statutory sickness funds set by the Gemeinsamer Bundesausschuss (G-BA). IQWiG evaluates competing technologies within specific therapeutic areas, placing more weight on clinical evidence and the relative efficiency of competing therapies.

Practical implications – Although having deep political and cultural antecedents, differences between NICE and IQWiG can be explained by perspective: the former guiding resource allocation across an entire system (macro-evaluation), the latter focusing on efficiency within the bounds of a particular therapeutic area (micro-evaluation). Given the decentralized nature of the US health care system, and the relative powers of different medical specialties, the IQWiG model presents a more suitable case study to guided CER efforts in the US.

Health care institutions in many Western countries have developed preoperative testing and assessment guidelines to improve surgical outcomes and reduce cost of surgical care. The aims of this chapter are to (1) summarize the literature on the effect of preoperative testing on clinical outcomes, efficiency, and cost; and (2) to compare preoperative testing guidelines developed in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

We reviewed the literature from 1975 to 2014 for studies and preoperative testing guidelines.

We identified 29 empirical studies and 8 country-specific guidelines for review. Most studies indicate that preoperative testing is overused and comes at a high cost. Guidelines are tied to payment only in one country studied. This is the most recent review of the literature on preoperative testing and assessment with a focus on quality of care, efficiency, and cost outcomes. In addition, this chapter provides an international comparison of preoperative guidelines.