The growth and development of health information systems have been of a scale, and at a pace, that many health professionals are left wondering quite how to relate to the changes that have taken place. This comprehensive text is aimed at both practitioners and students, and it relates systems and management theories to applications found in health settings, and compares the best of international practice. It sets out the basic principles of health management information systems, and illustrates them with examples and case studies from a wide range of health care applications and from a number of different countries, including the USA, the UK, Germany and Australia. Ideal for practitioners, health care managers, and for undergraduate and postgraduate students in public health and clinical specializations, Health Management Information Systems shows how information can and should be best used as a management resource.

This is the fifth and final in a Series of five manuals produced by the Social Security Department of the ILO to provide the reader with information on all the major elements of social security, including the principles, administration, financing, pension schemes and social health insurance. It provides an overview of social health insurance schemes and looks at the development of health care policies and feasibility issues. In addition, it also examines the design of health insurance schemes, health care benefits, financing and costs, and organization as well as considering the operational and strategic information requirements. Other manuals in this series: - Social security principles (Vol. I) - Administration of social security (Vol. II) - Social security financing (Vol. III) - Pension schemes (Vol. IV)

An introduction for students to financial management, especially central and provincial government departments. The book is also suited to both academics and practitioners.

This book explores the roles and workings of the heads of government departments in six nations: departmental secretaries in Australia, departmentschefs in Denmark, directeurs d'administration in France, secretaris-generaal in the Netherlands, chief executives in New Zealand, and permanent secretaries in the UK. It also seeks to explore their 'infinite variety' by showing how inherited government traditions shape the response to reform. It examines how such reforms as privatization and contracting out have affected who does these jobs and how they do them. It asks whether the demands of the new public management have made departmental heads more accountable, more public and more vulnerable. For each of the six countries the authors give details of departmental secretaries' backgrounds, their career paths, their conditions of employment, their impacts, and their changing positions. Central to each chapter are short biographies or portraits of top officials with extensive quotations from interviews in which they talk about how they see their worlds and how, for instance, they now focus more on managing their departments and less on policy-making. The experience of senior public servants is brought vividly to life. This book is the first comprehensive, comparative portrait of top government officials, and is an important resource for students and scholars of politics, public policy and public management, and makes fascinating reading for all senior civil servants themselves.

Public Sector Economics discusses the impact of government revenues and expenditures on economic activity, with special reference to developing countries. Howard raises theoretical and empirical issues relating to the role of the public sector in economic development.

The book is comprehensive in scope: topics include public goods, market failure, the role of government, public choice and political business cycles, public expenditure growth, structural adjustment and taxation.

In addition, the book raises issues that are neglected in traditional texts on the public sector, such as poverty alleviation, tax administration and the operation of the VAT in developing countries. The text is written in a style that is accessible to policy makers, practising economists and students interested in the role of government and the political economy of decision making.

This book seeks to promote a new spiritual approach to organizational leadership that goes beyond visionary management to a new focus on the spiritual for both leader and led. Reflecting on the current crisis of meaning in America, this book takes up the search for significance in peoples' worklives—in the products they produce and in the services they offer. Recognizing that the new corporation has become the dominant community for many— commanding most of our waking hours by providing a focus for life, a measure of personal success, and a network of personal relationships—Fairholm calls on business leaders to focus their attention on the processes of community among their stakeholders: wholeness, integrity, stewardship, and morality. Spiritual leadership is seen here as a dynamic, interactive process. Successful leadership in the new American workplace, therefore, is dependent on a recognition that leadership is a relationship, not a skill or a personal attribute. Leaders are leaders only as far as they develop relationships with their followers, relationships that help all concerned to achieve their spiritual, as well as economic and social, fulfillment.

This text explores the impact of the changes in local government upon the attitudes, behaviour and job satisfaction of the managers most affected by them. On the basis of a detailed review of recent research findings and theoretical debates, it outlines the major changes affecting local government organizations and the duties and responsibilities of those working with them. The text then examines how far the rhetoric of "new managerialism" is supported by the reality of change.

This is the second in a Series of five manuals produced by the Social Security Department of the ILO to provide the reader with information on all the major elements of social security, including the principles, administration, financing, pension schemes and social health insurance. This manual deals with one of the most important aspects for any social security institution or scheme administration. It provides a general overview, looks at policy, structures, common features and examines principles of good management, as well as levels of administration, coverage, registration procedures, collection and recording of contributions, and the award and payment of benefits. The public relations element is also dealt with and a close look is taken at the management of human resources, recruitment, training, career development and performance. Other manuals in this series: - Social security principles (Vol. I) - Social security financing (Vol. III) - Pension schemes (Vol. IV) - Social health insurance (Vol. V)

This book provides an alternative means of discussing the development and significance of managers and management in universities and colleges. It is particularly concerned with the way 'managing' involves the development of different ways of talking, acting and relating to people at work. Yet this is often difficult, and variably successful, as it confronts often strong professional and occupational work identities and cultures. The book provides a detailed look at the 'manager' in contemporary further and higher education in Britain as post-compulsory education has been required to operate on more commercial basis, and universities and colleges are increasingly regarded as small to medium sized enterprises.

It draws upon interviews with more than 70 senior post-holders. It explores, for example, the work of the traditional university vice-chancellor who came to see himself as the new chief executive, schooled himself in the works of international management gurus Henry Mintzberg and Tom Peters, and engaged his 3000 staff in the virtues of 'thriving on chaos'. The result, as one seasoned higher education observer has noted, was '18 months of misery' for university personnel. It tells the story of the professor of material science who came to see himself as a small businessman responsible for maintaining a 2 million a year departmental turnover. But at the same time he considered this new identity to be constantly hamstrung by the bureaucratic centralism of his university. It tells these stories of senior women administrators who, empowered by their appointment as managers, challenged the deeply embedded paternalism of their senior academic colleagues. And it tells the stories ofnumerous heads of department and sections repositioned as managers in the 'new marketized further education' who have struggled to re-imagine students as funding units, and colleagues as 'their staff'.

Craig Prichard provides a highly nuanced, theoretically sophisticated, and critically informed account of the repositioning of senior university and college academics as managers. This is important reading for those interested in post-compulsory education, public sector management, and the sociology of work and education; and, of course, for university and college managers themselves.

This ground-breaking study provides a balanced investigation into the significance of the so-called 'information age' to contemporary government. It examines available perspectives on the relationship between information and communication technology and social change, and applies them to the organization and practice of governing and governance in the UK. In particular, it assesses current debates on the New Public Management, the reinvention of government, the new public consumerism and 'electronic democracy' in the light of these perspectives. It explores policy stances towards the 'information superhighway' andthe likely effects on future public services. The authors believe that the capabilities associated with information and communication technologies are of immense potential significance for government. At the same time, the authors adopt a critical stance towards the assumption that information-age technology will lead directly and quickly to dramatic or radical change. A key theme of the book, therefore, is the power of existing governmental institutions and traditions and how these shape and contain technologically-supported innovation. It is in developing this theme that the book makes its major theoretical contribution to public administration and management.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century in cities across America, both men and women struggled for urban reform but in distinctively different ways. Adhering to gender roles of the time, men working for independent research bureaus sought to apply scientific and business practices to corrupt city governments, while women in the settlement house movement labored to improve the lives of the urban poor by testing new services and then getting governments to adopt them.

Although the two intertwined at first, the contributions of these "settlement women" to the development of the administrative state have been largely lost as the new field of public administration evolved from the research bureaus and diverged from social work. Camilla Stivers now shows how public administration came to be dominated not just by science and business but also by masculinity, calling into question much that is taken for granted about the profession and creating an alternative vision of public service.

"Bureau Men, Settlement Women" offers a rare look at the early intellectual history of public administration and is the only book to examine the subject from a gender perspective. It recovers the forgotten contributions of women-their engagement in public life, concern about the proper aims of government, and commitment to citizenship and community-to show that they were ultimately more successful than their male counterparts in enlarging the work and moral scope of government.

Stivers's study helps explain public administration's long-standing "identity crisis" by showing why the separation of male and female roles restricted public administration to an unnecessary instrumentalism. It also provides the most detailed examination in half a century of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research and its role in the development of twentieth-century public administration.

By reconsidering the origins of the field and calling for a new sense of purpose in public service, Stivers suggests that public administrators need not rigidly emulate business practices but should instead strive to improve the ways in which they deal with people. Her well-researched critique will help students and professionals better understand their calling and challenge them to reconsider how they think about, educate for, and perform government service.

A president's least-noticed important legacy is his appointment of judges to the lower federal bench. How are these judges chosen? What happens behind the scenes? How important are senators, party organizations, the American Bar Association, and others in the selection process? In this landmark book, a leading authority on lower federal court judicial selections tells the riveting story of how nine presidents over a period of fifty-six years have chosen federal judges. Sheldon Goldman has interviewed participants, and he has mined published and unpublished government documents and archives, along with memos, letters, and other documents in the papers of every president from Franklin Roosevelt through Ronald Reagan, to bring to life the judicial selection process. His book is filled with richly drawn and dramatic accounts of each president's use of judicial appointments to further policy, partisan, and personal agendas. Goldman analyzes political and social changes that have occurred over the years and the impact of those changes on the profile of those selected for the bench. His statistical portraits of the backgrounds of each administration's appointees point up the changing face of the federal judiciary. The author also documents the responses of each presidential administration to calls for gender and race diversification of the bench. Casting bright light on the little-known details of judicial selection politics, Picking Federal Judges is sure to become the definitive book on this subject.

According to Paul C. Light's controversial new book, The New Public Service, this January's 4.8 percent federal pay increase will do little to compensate for what potential employees think is currently missing from federal careers. Talented Americans are not saying "show me the money" but "show me the job." And federal jobs just do not show well.

All job offers being equal, Light argues that the pay increase would matter. But all offers are not equal. Light's research on what graduates of the top public policy and administration graduate programs want indicates that the federal government is usually so far behind its private and nonprofit competitors that pay never comes into play.

Light argues that the federal government is losing the talent war on three fronts. First, its hiring system for recruiting talent, top to bottom, underwhelms at almost every task it undertakes. Second, its annual performance appraisal system is so inflated that federal employees are not only all above average, they are well on their way to outstanding. Third and most importantly, the federal government is so clogged with needless layers and convoluted career paths that it cannot deliver the kind of challenging work that talented Americans expect.

None of these problems would matter, Light argues, if the government-centered public service was still looking for work. Unfortunately, as Light's book demonstrates, federal careers were designed for a workforce that has not punched since the 1960s, and certainly not for one that grew up in an era of corporate downsizing and mergers. The government-centered public service is mostly a thing of the past, replaced by a multisectored public service in which employees switch jobs and sectors with ease.

Light concludes his book by offering the federal government a simple choice: It can either ignore the new public service and troll further and further down the class lists for new recruits, while hoping that a tiny pay increase will help, or it can start building the kind of careers that talented Americans want.

This book explores how the theories and practices of public management have evolved. It covers themes such as political, judicial, and cultural environments. It reviews the influential theoretical developments that represent the intellectual heritage of public administration from Woodrow Wilson and the classics to current schools such as Total Quality Management (TQM) and the drive for reinventing government. The author identifies and explains critical managerial functions such as decisionmaking, communication, leadership, performance evaluation, and the constant search for reform and improvement in public organizations. This comprehensive, in-depth exploration emphasizes the operational and practical consequences of the subject.

Using a set of rules as a guide for cost-effective policy analysis, Communicating Social Science Research to Policy Makers helps applied researchers avoid costly mistakes in policy planning and public administration research. Beginning with a practical approach to policy analysis, authors Roger J. Vaughan and Terry F. Buss show the reader how to prepare a nonbiased description of the problem to be studied, how to diagnose the causes of the problem, how to explore the various strategies for dealing with the problem and related issues, how to use formal forecasting projections, how to do cost-benefits analysis, how an analyst can decide what information to communicate, and strategies for the most-effective communication of policy analysis.

Public involvement is a key theme within the post-reform NHS, with an emphasis on involving people in healthcare decision-making, improving accountability to the public, and developing a stronger focus on the consumer. This text seeks to establish a framework for public involvement in healthcare.;Focusing on purchasing, the authors describe the central factors driving involvement, and the organizational structures and processes which underpin it. Recommendations are made for the development of effective strategies for public involvement in healthcare purchasing. A discussion of current issues and debates is set within a wider theoretical and historical examination of the concepts of "citizenship and "accountability", detailing the role of the consumer in the context of the major changes in the organization and delivery of public services which have taken place in Britain in the last two decades.

The "rationing" of health care has become one of the most emotive issues of the 1990s in the UK, causing much public confusion and political controversy. This book provides a comprehensive and critical introduction to this debate. It does so by examining the processes which determine who gets what in the way of treatment, the decision makers involved at different levels in the NHS and the criteria used in making such decisions. In particular it analyses the relationship between decisions about spending priorities (taken by politicians and managers) and decisions about rationing care for individual patients (taken by doctors), between explicit and implicit rationing. As well as drawing on research-based evidence about what is happening in Britain today, Managing Scarcity also looks at the experience of the NHS since 1948 and puts the case of health care in the wider context of publicly funded services and programmes which have to allocate limited resources according to non-market criteria. Managing Scarcity is recommended reading for students and researchers of health policy, as well as health professionals and policy makers at all levels in the NHS.

This publication addresses the complex questions of improving accountability, responsiveness and legal frameworks in the public sector, particularly in developing countries. The topics covered include: the role of the State and the future of public services faced with the problems of transition and development; the institutional implications of changing policy management; the role and scope of public administration in Central and Eastern European countries; recent changes in Asian public service in a context of privatisation; a Latin American view of urban transportation as a socio-economic policy; what form of administration for what State. The annexes include the Resolution adopted by the General Assembly (UN) on Public Administration and Development; Highlights of the General Assembly Resumed Session on Public Administration and Development; and the historical background of the IIAS and the UN.

This work contains reports of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences. The scientific programme emphasizes a comparative approach and incorporates significant theoretical and conceptual developments. Six workshops are reported upon including the reconstruction of government functions, decentralization, redesigning for responsiveness, accountability and risk-taking, special interests and client relationships, reaffirmation of values, and mobilizing learning. A panel on administrative reform in China forms a unique contribution. Readers include professionals, scholars and students of public administration.

In this book comparative analysis is given of the way governments and social security systems reacted to the challenges facing established social security systems - and also social security systems to be established - in the context of the end of the XXth century: globalization and the changes it has brought in the perception and possibilities of establishing or maintaining the welfare state. The selection of countries is due to both scientific criteria - it has been decided to start with western industrialized countries - and non scientific ones: the availability of specialists in selected countries. It is clear therefore that, even if restricted to western industrialized countries, the sample of countries which are studied here are not representative of all the main systems of social security. Countries such as Germany, France and the Netherlands are clearly missing for those readers who are looking for a broad description of existing systems. Looking at the different chapters of this book, a rather diverse and broad overview of problems and solutions are given, adapting social security systems to the environment of the XXIst century.

Health care in the United States at the end of the 20th century occupies a completely different place in the economy, in the public consciousness, and in its impact on government, than it did at the beginning of the century, or even in the early years of the Clinton Administration. Health care is now a multi-billion dollar industry; one that consumes more than 15 percent of the nation's GNP. Citizens now regard health care as essential to the quality of their lives, and a steady stream of new medications and procedures point to ways to extend the lives of our aging population and restore those injured on or off the job. At the same time, the changing patterns of health care have stirred a national debate over the growth of managed care and the role that government can play in providing solid health care standards--a medical safety net--within tightening budgetary restraints. This book explores the role of the federal government in health care policy development from the years of the Founding Fathers to the present.

Kronenfeld reviews the key features of the American health care system, its infrastructure, and federal legislative process and outcomes in the health care arena. The current situation in health care is examined, with particular attention given to the attempt at major reform in the first Clinton administration, and to the modest changes that were ultimately passed. She closes with an examination of the future of health care and the role of government, emphasizing how current health care issues and concerns may set the stage for a changed federal role in funding and delivery of health care services in the next century. This comprehensive examination of the role of government in the health care system will be of great interest to students and researchers of public policy and the social aspects of American health care.