Managing the Myths of Health Care: Bridging the Separations Between Care, Cure, Control, and Community

By: Henry Mintzberg

Narrated by: Tom Kruse

Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's Summary

Mintzberg begins in part one by confronting myths about health care, including:

• We have a system of health care
• Health care institutions can be fixed with more heroic leadership
• The health care system can be fixed by more administrative engineering
• The health care system can be fixed by more categorizing and commodifying to facilitate more calculating
• The health care system can be fixed with increased competition
• Health care organizations can be fixed by running them more like businesses

Part two examines how health care is organized, in relation to what we know about differentiation, separation, and integration in organizations and systems in general. Mintzberg shows that in health care the inclination has been to do an awful lot more differentiating than integrating. This has resulted in all sorts of excessive separations: curtains across the specialties, sheets over the patients, and walls and floors between the administrators. The favored form of organizing health care - the professional organization - is the source of its great strength as well as its debilitating weakness.

Part three then offers guidelines to reframe the core components of health care: strategy, organization, scale, ownership, management, and the "system" itself. For example, managing has to be about care more than cure, and organizing has to favor communityship over leadership, collaboration over competition.

©2017 Henry Mintzberg (P)2017 Henry Mintzberg

Very interesting thoughts into both management and healthcare

I found this book one of the non-fiction audiobooks I could actually listen to the whole way through. This is largely due to the interesting management theories that Mintzberg highlights, talks through and negates. I found Kruse’s voice hard to listen to in depth for the first few chapters, but after a while I got into the swing of it. There were a few sections which would refer to figures or text boxes, which are always difficult in audiobooks, but these were explained well.

Overall a worthwhile audiobook for anyone interested in the healthcare industry.

would be 5 star but

excellent analysis of healthcare systems and good suggestion for addressing the problems we face. however I can't really recommend a or take seriously a book that promotes homeopathy which is a real shame

A must read (or listen) for anyone involved or interested in healthcare

This book successfully weaves together many relevant threads in an approachable style. I would have given it five stars had it not been for the occasional overuse of perception stated as fact; otherwise brilliant.