A note on co-ordinating the AIDS crisis: issues for policy management and research
✍ Scribed by Paul Anand
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 92 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0749-6753
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Though not always popular in health circles, good management can be as crucial to eective health care as getting the basic science or medicine right. In many areas, healthcare systems excel at the latter but do not necessarily regard healthcare management itself as a proper topic for scienti®c research. Where the methods of policy implementation are routine, well understood, not organizationally complex, and relatively unpoliticized (some child-immunization programmes perhaps), the omission may be benign; and, for other conditions, the diverse nature of aected groups, the international dierences in epidemiology, and the variations in economic and social institutions involved in responding to the issues, an understanding of the managerial issues is critical . In a sense, the establishment of the UN's multiagency Global Programme for AIDS (GPA) in 1996 illustrates the international recognition of this point at a structural level. Whether healthcare management will be accorded the importance given to ®elds like public health, social psychology or even health economics within GPA's research portfolio is another matter.
An issue that has emerged, however, in the management of an organizational response to HIV at all levels (from grass root organizations to international organizations) arises from the need to co-ordinate between a wide variety of organizational types, and within a mix of professional and lifestyle cultures. Some work has already been done in this area, though much of it is critically descriptive; for instance, , Guillen (1990), Foreman (1993). Useful as this kind of research is, the emphasis tends to be on highlighting problems and, without some appropriate conceptual (managerial) framework, prescriptions for remedial action are dicult to generate (sometimes) and/or evaluate (frequently).
This note seeks to sharpen our understanding of co-ordination and its signi®cance in healthcare management by oering a picture of an activity where information, incentives and the mixing of various (professional and other) cultures are key. The research design was policy driven (Hakim, 1988), and concentrated on incentives, decision-making and information gathering/