Toward healthier hospitals

This article builds around a framework of cure, care, control, and community, with collaboration at the center, to consider 12 issues common to many hospitals. These include, among others, the fragmentation of efforts, confusion in mission (and in mission statements), the problems of bundling research with clinical work, selectivity in informing board members, the dangers of professional management, and the difficulties of combining external advocacy with internal reconciliation in the senior manager's job. The article concludes that hospitals could better learn how to solve systemic problems systemically, and that to do so will require not the wish lists of strategic planning and structural reorganizing, but tangible changes in their collective behavior.