FUTURE DIRECTION OF HEALTH CARE

Future Direction of Health Care

Introduction:

Just as sociological perspectives on medicine have changed over time, the profession has also inhabited a changing health and healthcare context. There has been a major transformation from a situation in which physicians were petty bourgeois entrepreneurs to physicians as part of huge and growing health-care markets. A situation in which health care was given primarily in the domestic sphere has been transformed into one in which most health care is provided 'impersonally' by paid experts within a mass market for care.

In the duration of less than a century, medical work has changed from individual healers within a 'cottage industry' to a highly complex health-care division of labor surrounded by huge industries. Health care now dwarfs in size such industrial giants as steel and automobile manufacturing and, in most Western countries, spending on health care is in the range of 8-9 per cent of national GNPs. In this progression, physicians have become involved with large institutions, private and public.

The fate of medicine is tied not only to state bureaucracies, but also to the dynamics of both health-care and non-health care businesses and to the transformation of capitalism itself. Medicine relates to other institutions whether medicine still functions mainly within a more market-orientated or a more public-orientated health-care system. The profession itself is composed of a complex series of organizations and groups in which the role of the profession as a corporate entity can, at least analytically, be separated from the actions of individual practitioners (Dent, 1993).

Current issues regarding medicine thus cannot be fully understood without contextualizing changes in the profession within broader trends towards globalization, a general increase in the power of corporations and the rise of neo-conservatism, a decline in the relative autonomy of the state, and subsequent attacks on the 'Keynesian welfare state.' These processes include an increasing tendency to cap the costs of care through attempts to control utilization and to make health care more effective and efficient; that is the rationalization of care 'from above.' This rationalization, whether involving more competition within health care, an increased 'managerialism,' or greater or lesser privatization, or some combination of these, almost always implies intrusion onto territory previously controlled by medicine.

In this section our focus centers on the comparative study of health sector reform within the evolving context of global change (Larkin, 1993).

Proposed Health Care Reform and Legislation:

In spite of schemes, additional alterations are essential and fundamental for the ongoing success of care system. These alterations in the structures will modify how organizations operate in the prospect. Reforms will also alter how marketers become accustomed to the new atmosphere. There are a various strategies which all businesses and marketer ought to take up as health care system comes to execution.

Organizational Strategies:

As alterations happen in the health care system, marketers can take a headship position in their hospitals. They should preserve secure relations among administrators, physicians, managers, and employees. Reforms will exert four stresses on businesses: information; excellence; doctor relations; and ...