Rationing: Constructed Realities and Professional Practices

1. Introduction. A sociological perspective on rationing: power, rhetoric and situated practices (Donald Light and David Hughes).

2. Risk and Rationing. Rationing through risk assessment in clinical genetics: all categories have wheels (Lindsay Prior).

3. Governmentality and risk: setting priorities in the new NHS (Paul Joyce).

4. Rationing in Hospitals. Categorisation and micro-rationing: access to care in a French emergency department (Carine Vassy).

5. Everyday experiences of implicit rationing: comparing the voices of nurses in California and British Columbia (Ivy Lynn Bourgeault, Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Jacqueline Choiniere, Joel Lexchin, Eric Mykhalovskiy, Suzanne Peters and Jerry White).

6. Rationing in the Community. Rationing health car to disabled people (Gary L. Albrecht).

7. Categorising to exclude: the discursive construction of cases in community mental health teams (Lesley Griffiths).

8. Professional Resistance. Subverting criteria: the role of precedent in decisions to finance surgery (John Heritage, Elizabeth Boyd and Lawrence Kleinman).

9. Clinical actions and financial constraints: the limits to rationing intensive care (Irvine Lapsley and Kath Melia).

Index.