Decision-making in hospital management

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Werner Vogd
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory ; Education Systems and Educational Institutions
• Term: from 2013 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 234607988

The proposed project is based on the hypothesis that increasing economic pressure on hospitals has not led one-dimensionally to issues relating to cost efficiency. Rather, hospital managers continue to face the challenge of linking together the demands of health policies, legal regulations, medical professionalism and increasing cost pressure in a way which ensures the continuity of the hospital as an organisation. This generates decision-making practices which are neither monocausally economic, nor attributable exclusively to political or medical constraints, but which can only be understood in the context of the organisation itself. The proposed project aims at the reconstruction of precisely these practices of decision-making in hospital managements. The managements of various hospitals are to be compared using a qualitative, knowledge-sociological research design. Balanced theoretical sampling is intended to offer insights into the key factors influencing decision-making. Thus, private institutions will be compared with those in the public sector, or peripheral locations with more central urban locations. A typology is to be formed which reconstructs the various forms of decision-making, and conditions will be identified which make it more probable that specific approaches will be adopted. Successful forms of hospital management will be identified, judged in terms of reaching the most acceptable fulfilment of medical, economic, and political/legal expectations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants