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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Richard J. Bogue, PhD, Richard Bogue and Affiliates, 4419 Farmington Avenue, Richton Park, IL 60471, 708-679-0179, rjb@richbogue.com and Nuria Homedes, MD, DrPH, School of Public Health, University of Texas Houston, Health Science Center, 1100 North Stanton, Suite # 110, El Paso, TX 79902.
Ensuring accountability to communities and individuals is one of the most direct ways of putting the public back into public health. Governance is the exercise of authority for a hospital’s mission, goals, policies and strategies, and for evaluating performance. In Latin America, much experimentation is taking place in hospital governance, with potentially profound impacts on accountability to individuals, communities, organizations and national health systems. While hospital governance has been researched extensively in the United States, there has been little research in Latin America. Yet, knowledge gained from US studies is of limited value in Latin America, because of different legal, political, and cultural traditions.
The subject of the presentation is a six-nation project designed to produce a uniquely Latin American taxonomy of hospital governance. With support from the World Bank, an international team of researchers is organizing and collecting both key informant interview data and survey data in Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, México, and Panamá. More than 25 functions of hospital governance are examined, including such issues as who has the authority to hire the top administrative staff, to approve the organization’s budget, or to determine which caregivers may work in the hospital. Analyses will examine patterns among who has the authority for different governance functions, revealing types or models of hospital governance in Latin America. This taxonomic resource will serve as a foundation for future research.
The presentation will review the study and the resulting taxonomy. In addition, the policy and pragmatic implications of these findings, and potential future uses of the taxonomy, will be discussed.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Accountability, Human Populations
Related Web page: www.richbogue.com
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.