Role of hospital leadership in combating the COVID-19 pandemic

Hospitals all around the world play an essential role in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. During an epidemic event, hospital leaders frequently face new challenges requiring them to perform unaccustomed tasks, which might be well beyond the scope of their previous practice and experience. While no absolute set of characteristics is necessary in all leadership situations, certain traits, skills and competencies tend to be more critical than others in crisis management times. We will discuss some of the most important ones in this manuscript. To strengthen those managerial competencies needed to face outbreaks, healthcare leaders should be better supported by competency-based training courses as it is more and more clear that traditional training courses are not as effective as they were supposed to be. It seems we should look at the COVID-19 pandemic as a learning opportunity to re-frame what we expect from hospital leaders and to re-think the way we train, assess and evaluate them.

THE SET-THEORETIC MULTIVERSE

The multiverse view in set theory, introduced and argued for in this article, is the view that there are many distinct concepts of set, each instantiated in a corresponding set-theoretic universe. The universe view, in contrast, asserts that there is an absolute background set concept, with a corresponding absolute set-theoretic universe in which every set-theoretic question has a definite answer. The multiverse position, I argue, explains our experience with the enormous range of set-theoretic possibilities, a phenomenon that challenges the universe view. In particular, I argue that the continuum hypothesis is settled on the multiverse view by our extensive knowledge about how it behaves in the multiverse, and as a result it can no longer be settled in the manner formerly hoped for.

Relations of History and Theory

Most economic theorists nowadays appreciate that particular theories are peculiarly relevant to particular historical situations, and gain their chief importance from this relevance. In place of one absolute set of propositions, economists are becoming accustomed to the idea that their theoretical arsenal needs to include, for example, weapons suited to conditions of approximately full employment, and different weapons suited to conditions of depression. The dependence of theory on conditions properly goes further than this. We need to ask whether our fundamental concepts are appropriate to the historical conditions of the time to which they are to be applied.