Managerial Solutions to Hospitals' Challenges

[Autom. eng. transl.] In the attempt to provide a global vision about the hospitals challenges, the present book analyzes their external and internal sources, represented by the dense network of rules and expectations coming from institutions, patients, professionals in which hospitals are embedded. The numerous changes occurred within the large part of healthcare systems during the last 20 years, have determined important consequences to which hospital managers have necessarily answered. Uncertainty, rules, innovations are just some of the main ingredients of the challenges. Mimicry, legitimacy, managerial fashions diffusion instead represents some of the core strategies to face them. Hospitals survival depends on their ability to intercept on time and to promptly accomplish to the external expectations; manager's role is to create a workplace in which changes are possible. Individual and organizational work value congruence can facilitate it by improving the quality of communications, the degree of trust in the hospitals mission, the physicians 'and nurses' knowledge about processes and relationship. But hospitals challenges reach up to the single physician, asking him to play new and often conflicting roles. The "new" physician needs to balance his time, to accomplish ambiguous expectations, to fulfill heterogeneous tasks, to compete for scarce resources in order to embrace the changes. In this vein physicians' negotiating style and ability assumes a strategic role.