The Transfer of the North American Ideas of Hospital Management to Europe in the 20th Century: The Case of Spain

Abstract

This chapter contributes to a better knowledge of the role played by the collective entrepreneurship of networks of scientists and doctors in the transfer and adaptation of ideas on hospital organization and management for modern hospitals with new technology, from Western Europe and above all the United States. Literature about new medical technology has demonstrated how medical innovations required changes in human capital and organization in hospitals, to benefit patients in the private and the public hospitals after World War II. The chapter provides an analysis about the origins of the modern North American ideas about professionalization and hospital accreditation, in the consolidation of a modern hospital management and organization. In particular, the focus is in demonstrating how networks of scientists’ entrepreneurs were fundamental drivers in the process of knowledge transfer and the dissemination of these ideas to the large Western European hospitals. More specifically, the chapter studies the diffusion of the new ideas about the large hospital organization and management from the United States to the Western Europe, applied to the Spanish context. Informal networks of doctors applied new ideas developed in the United States to new clinics and hospitals in Spain. Some of them occupied official positions in the key public health administrations and were crucial to introducing the hospital accreditation systems and the US ideas in Spain.

Citation

Fernández Pérez, P. (2023), "The Transfer of the North American Ideas of Hospital Management to Europe in the 20th Century: The Case of Spain", Fernández Pérez, P. and San Román, E. (Ed.) Collective Entrepreneurship in the Contemporary European Services Industries: A Long Term Approach (Frontiers of Management History), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 47-59. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80117-950-820231004