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Managing the myths of health care : bridging the separations between care, cure, control, and community / Henry Mintzberg.

by Mintzberg, Henry.

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Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2017.

Health services administration.

Medical policy.

Health planning.

9781626569058 (pbk.)

Alternate title:

Myths of health care : bridging the separations between care, cure, control, and community

viii, 262 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

"A BK business book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This is a book about the management of health care, broadly. It is not about health care just in the United States, or Canada, or, for that matter, Malta. Leading management thinker Henry Mintzberg turns his attention to reframing the management and organization of health care. The problem is the present form of remote-control management detached from the operations yet determined to control them. It reorganizes relentlessly, measures like mad, promotes a heroic form of leadership, favors competition where the need is for cooperation, and pretends that the calling of health care should be managed like a business. This professional form of organizing is the source of health care's great strength as well as its debilitating weakness. In its administration, as in its operations, it categorizes whatever it can to apply standardized practices whose results can be measured. When the categories fit, this works wonderfully well. The physician diagnoses appendicitis and operates; some administrator ticks the appropriate box and pays. But what happens when the fit fails, when patients fall outside the categories or across several categories or need to be treated as people beneath the categories or when the managers and professionals pass each other like ships in the night? Mintzberg says that we need to reorganize our heads instead of our institutions. He discusses how we can think differently about systems and strategies, sectors and scale, measurement and management, leadership and organization, competition and collaboration. Henry Mintzberg is a professor of management studies at McGill University. He is the author of the books Managing (2009) and Rebalancing Society (2015).

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