Human resource management in the health-care industry.

It has been said that managing change is a synonym for managing people through change. No other industry has experienced more change in the past ten years than the health-care industry. In order to regulate all this change, managers in health-care organizations must identify new ways to deal with the changes. The issues are as old as time: job satisfaction, cultural conflict, and compensation. This paper addresses each of these key issues with the following examples. A new nursing paradigm that was implemented at a hospital has significantly increased job satisfaction. This paper also takes a look at ways to manage cultural conflict in a diversified workforce. Finally, the results of a team approach to compensation are studied.     

Unionization of institutions: A therapeutic event

Unionization of public employees, especially institutional personnel, is a phenomenon of recent origin. The entire service sector in increasingly sensitized to this activity. Personnel problems of institutions and rapid technological and communication changes are isolated to suggest reasons unions are increasingly attracted to and simultaneously welcomed by many employees. The conventional managerial wisdom of resisting unions is challenged by considering the therapeutic potential for patients and employees that may accompany broad-scale organization of institutional employees. Improvement of the power balance between professionals and subprofessionals is viewed as instrumental in strengthening the psychological bond between patients and employees, and mutual union-management interest areas are delineated to suggest an improved collective bargaining approach.He is consultant in management and education to The Brown Schools and former superintendent of the Abilene State School.     

Participation in decision-making in the health services

There is widespread discussion at the present time of 'participation'--allowing members of an organization to exert an influence on the process of decision-making. The National Health Service is not isolated from this debate and already a number of experiments have been carried out at various levels of the service to allow a wider range of opinion to influence decisions than hitherto. This paper reports on a study the author carried out into one such exercise, designed to assist a Health Board reach decisions about the longterm pattern of health care in its area. Nurses, paramedical staff and local authority staff, as well as doctors, were appointed to a series of programme planning committees to advise the Health Board on issues of longterm policy. After 2 years of operation, a study was carried out into the operation of the committees and the lessons drawn from the experience should be relevant to actual and potential members of any consultative or decision-making body.     

Physical environment and job satisfaction in a community mental health center

Relocation of professional staff in a community mental health center provided a setting in which to evaluate the effects of physical environment on job satisfaction. Two mental health teams moved from an old, drab central clinic building to new satellite clinics while a third team remained in the old building. Relocated staff reported significant increase in satisfaction with physical surroundings as compared to staff that did not move. Furthermore, satisfaction with physical surroundings had some impact on overall satisfaction ratings. Physical surroundings in a community mental health center may be a mediating variable for staff morale and effectiveness.     

The productivity potential of physicians' assistants

Although many previous analytical studies indicate that physicians' assistants can substantially increase productivity and reduce costs, the utilization of physicians' assistants in ambulatory health care settings has grown at a disappointing rate. This apparent discrepancy may be explained in part through close examination of the models used in the analytical studies. This paper describes the limitations of previous studies and shows how analysis can be improved through the use of a combined optimization-simulation model. The model is applied to a hypothetical example to demonstrate how productivity and income benefits can be overstated, and to test the sensitivity of such benefits to a range of management policies for the ambulatory care practice regarding patient load, physical resources, appointment scheduling, and more flexible assignment of providers to patients.     

关于医务社会工作者在器官移植中的角色定位问题的思考

器官移植是医学领域发展中一项具有划时代意义的现代医学技术，在今天以及未来的医学领域中占有重要的地位。结合我国器官移植的现状对器官移植中医务社会工作者的角色与功能进行探讨。     

规制——药品监督管理研究的新视角

综述规制与规制理论相关概念,并结合药品行业特点,对药品规制的内容及与药品监督管理的异同等进行探讨,指出规制和规制理论是药品监督管理研究的新视角和新思路,对我国药品监督管理研究有积极意义.