Abstract
Describing how hospitals are organized and administered is somewhat like describing high schools. The differences in their size, location, and special programs may be more important than their similarities in organizational structure. Nevertheless, an introduction to hospitals is useful as long as it is remembered that the generalities must be modified by the idiosyncracies of each hospital or other health care facility.
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Notes
See American Hospital Association, Hospital Statistics (Chicago: AHA, 1987). For an excellent history of the American hospital, see C. Rosenberg,The Care of Strangers (New York: Basic Books, 1987); and see T. Christ-offel, Health and the Law (New York: Free Press, 1982) at 105-40.
J. K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), at 176. As Galbraith notes, the goal of expansion “in the output of many goods is not easily accorded a social purpose. More cigarettes cause more cancer. More alcohol causes more cirrhosis. More automobiles cause more accidents, maiming and death, more preemption of space for highways and parking, [and] more pollution of the air and the countryside” (id. at 164).
Knowles, “The Hospital,” Scientific American, Sept. 1973, at 143.
New York regulations restrict house staff to twelve-hour emergency room shifts, and twenty-four-hour shifts in other areas of the hospital without time off, to a maximum of eighty a week on average (Barrow, “Making Sure Doctors Get Enough Sleep,” New York Times, May 22, 1988, at E7). In addition to reduced working hours, hours must be better distributed, ancillary services improved, moonlighting restricted, and noncompliance with new rules punished. See McCall, No Turning Back: A Blueprint for Residency Reform, 261 JAMA 909-10 (1989); and Colford & McPhee, The Ravelled Sleeve of Care, 261 JAMA 889 (1989).}
“A Look Ahead: What the Future Holds for Nursing,” RN, Oct. 1987, at 101-8; “Fed up, Fearful and Frazzled,” Time, Mar. 14, 1988, at 77–78.
See generally R. Cranford & A. E. Doudera, eds., Institutional Ethics Committees and Health Care Decision Making (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Health Administration Press, 1984).
T. Parsons, “Definitions of Health and Illness in the Light of American Values and Social Structure,” in E. G. Jaco, ed., Patients, Physicians and Illness (New York: Free Press, 1958).
M. Konner, Becoming a Doctor (New York: Penguin, 1988), at 373. See also P. Klass, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure (New York: Putnam, 1987; S. Hoffman, Under the Ether Dome (New York: Scribner’s, 1987; and S. Shem, House of God (New York: Marek, 1978).
Konner, supra note 8, at 373; and see supra note 4.
J. Howard, “Health Care,” Encyclopedia of Bioethics (New York: Free Press, 1978) II: 619–23.
See S. Gorovitz, Moral Problems in Medicine (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1976).
J. Ladd, “Legalism in Medical Ethics,” in J. Davis, ed., Comtemporary Issues in Biomedicai Ethics (Clifton, N.J.: Humana Press, 1978). See also Callahan, Contemporary Biomedicai Ethics, 302 New Eng. J. Med. 1228 (1980).
See, e.g., Okrent, “You and the Doctor: Striving for a Better Relationship,” New York Times Magazine, Part II, Mar. 29, 1987, at 18.
Lorber, Good Patients and Problem Patients: Conformity and Deviance in a General Hospital, 16 J. Health & Social Behavior 213–25 (1975).
Id. And see R. Macklin, Mortal Choices (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, at 214–16.
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© 1992 George J. Annas and the American Civil Liberties Union
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Annas, G.J. (1992). How Hospitals Are Organized. In: The Rights of Patients. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0397-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0397-1_2
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