"Directoring" and managing in a professional system

Pathologists are under siege by corporate medicine, managed care systems, or varieties of government-initiated health care restructuring. The pressure is on us to attend at least equally to fiscal pressures, as well as to our patients' medical needs. These pressures must be accommodated within the limits of our professional duties and responsibilities. We must have more than an intuitive sense of what it is to be a professional and to work in a system that is overseen typically by a directorate and that includes managers and innovators. The example of the failure of the corporate managers and directors of a national blood transfusion service highlights the need to balance the inter-relationships of managers, professionals, and innovators by a directorate knowledgeable in these complex systems.