Excellence in Healthcare Management claims to fill a void in the literature for students of management and information management in the health care context. Presented in four parts, the book sets out to address the more strategic, conceptual and thought‐provoking issues of key health care debates. These four sections are identified as the key issues in health care management and include:
- 1.
human resource management;
- 2.
quality, finance and information management;
- 3.
health care education and training; and
- 4.
the politics of health care management.
Chapter One focuses on organisational change within the health care sector and its implications for human resource management. It provides a comprehensive review of the literature and an extensive bibliography for the reader to delve further into the multifarious issues raised in the text. Disappointingly, however, many of these issues were barely introduced or described in the text. Chapter Two provides an overview of the changing context of the NHS and the potential future contribution of nursing, midwifery and health visiting, focusing on career opportunities for nursing professionals in the next century. The final chapter in the section, on excellence in human resource management, attempts to pull together discussions on organisational behaviour and occupational health matters and provides a useful overview of the literature associated with occupational health.
The second section considers concepts in quality, finance and information management and, usefully, the two chapters include a summary of key points. The evolution of quality management is traced, and techniques and approaches to quality in health care are described. Useful discussion points and questions to the reader are posed, and an extensive bibliography for further reading is provided. Finance and information management is described in a rather simplistic and superficial way, which barely provides an overview for students or health care practitioners, although the suggested further reading is included for readers who want to pursue a more in‐depth appreciation.
The third offers an analysis of funding in health care education and training, including a useful overview and critique of recent policy development in this area. The chapter on credentialling tends to focus more on micro issues, specifically within the nursing context. Its value in addressing the more strategic and conceptual issues in education and training is unclear.
The final section discusses the politics of health care and analyses the paradoxes evident in the management and provision of care. It poses numerous questions that will challenge the reader to examine notions of effective health care management arrangements and wets the appetite for further reading, a selection of which is suggested by the author.
Inevitably in a text that includes a range of contributions from practising managers, academics and educationalists, the individual chapters range from a fairly superficial discussion and overview of some of the key issues facing health care management to more esoteric issues associated with the context of health care provision and its management. Many of the specific professional examples cited in several of the chapters were almost entirely drawn from the nursing profession and readers from other disciplines may be frustrated by constant references to nursing (with unsubstantiated claims of applicability to other professional groups).
The editors claim that readers can access the book at the level of their particular interest, whether as managers, students of health care and social policy, clinicians, educators, social or management theorists, human resource specialists, policy developers or planners. I suspect that educationalists in health care, nursing students and health care professionals new to the discipline of management would find the book of particular interest. A useful feature of a number of chapters is the suggested further reading and extensive bibliography. A more systematic approach to providing a summary at the beginning of each chapter (or at the very least for each section) would provide a better focus for the busy reader.
