The Comparative Study of Social Organizations and Hospital
Abstract: Hospital is a social organization and logical combination of the activities of a number of persons with different level of knowledge and skill for achieving a common goal of patient care through a hierarchy of authority and responsibility. Public and professional interest in health services has increased dramatically over the last two decades. Medical sociologists have been interested in the structure, organization, dynamics, and impact of health services for well over 50 years. Sociologists have been instrumental in highlighting the challenges associated with integrating care, as well as the inter‐ and intra‐organizational dynamics that are occurring within increasingly complex healthcare systems (Flood and Fennel 1995; Light 2004; Scott et al. 2000). Understanding these organizational changes is critical because they reflect fundamental shifts in the nature of medical work and the delivery of health services. Today’s complex health systems represent fundamentally new configurations of an increasingly broad array of professional expertise that is altering the long standing system of professional. In this, the health care system has been elaborately discussed focusing mainly on hospital system. Following are some of the points focusing on hospital as a social organization. Goffman described hospitals as “total institutions” (referring in particular to asylums for those with mental health problems, but also to hospitals more generally), in which people were isolated from society over a period of time and led life an in enclosed and formally administered way (Goffman, 1968). He argued that, as a result of this experience, people often formed new relationships and attachments dependent on these institutions (i.e. underwent a process of “institutionalization”) that could make re-integration into the community on discharge very difficult. Keywords: Social organization, Hospital, Medical sociologists, Goffman, system of professional, “institutionalization