Publisher's Synopsis
This ebook offers many areas that may be ripe for for potential development, including: discourse and roles, spaces, service delivery, improvement processes, and ideologies and their impact. The authors have examined these wide-ranging interests in a variety of settings including call handling centres, ambulance services, primary care, acute care, and mental health, and forensic psychiatric hospitals. In moving forward, we note the importance of consolidating the attention afforded to these diverse themes and settings to encompass new areas of work (e.g. social and home care), delivered in new locations, by workers undertaking new roles. Establishing a vibrant critical field of healthcare organisation and management scholarship has not been, and is unlikely to be, quick or straightforward. This may be in part because scholars feel that engagement comes at the expense of critique. It must also be recognized that there are professional risks associated with any attempts to speak the truth to power. It is therefore necessary for the Academy (especially senior academics) to create safe havens for critical healthcare management scholarship through, for example, funded research posts, flexibility within curricula, and dedicated conferences and tracks. It was in this spirit that OBHC 2016 hosted its first-ever track of papers dedicated to critical healthcare management. We hope that the selection of papers from that landmark event presented here will represent green shoots in an emergent field of critical healthcare management studies.
