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The devastating 2014 Ebola outbreak caused human and economic loss, but it also resulted in remarkable improvement in healthcare leadership. The impact is most evident in the affected West African countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. In this chapter, the Ebola experience is used as a framework to explore the essential elements of healthcare leadership, with particular attention to healthcare crises in under-resourced communities. Overall, healthcare leadership presents unique challenges. In common with leaders of other industries, healthcare leaders must inspire others, create a sense of purpose, make difficult decisions and collaborate with a range of people. But, because their focus is on complex systems that aim to improve people's physical and mental well-being, expectations of healthcare leaders are especially high. Their work can be a matter of life or death. For the leader in an under-resourced area, the challenge and expectations are even higher, particularly in the face of new or emerging health threats. The key to effective healthcare leadership is systems thinking which involves looking at the entire system of care as an integrated whole, rather than discrete parts that operate in isolation. Healthcare leaders must understand that health means mobilizing multisectoral knowledge and resources and applying innovative and multiactor approaches to prevent, detect and address health problems. Since the 2014 Ebola crisis, healthcare leaders are increasingly using a systems approach by looking at the culture of health systems, the impact of diseases locally and globally, and the applicability of health interventions in different environments. In the post-Ebola era, steps to strengthen the healthcare system are described which includes the roles of healthcare leaders. These steps include deployment of field epidemiologists and community health agents, community education and fuller use of the One Health Platform, which allows actors from different sectors (human health, animal health and environmental health) to collaborate. Finally, suggestions for healthcare leadership training are offered.

This chapter explains how fundamental organisational change in the UK National Health Service (NHS) is being effected by new practices of digitised information gathering and use. It analyses the taken-for-granted IT infrastructures that lie behind digitisation and considers the relationship between digitisation and big data.

Qualitative research methods including discourse analysis, ethnography of software and key informant interviews were used. Actor-network theories, as developed by Science and technology Studies (STS) researchers were used to inform the research questions, data gathering and analysis. The chapter focuses on the aftermath of legislation to change the organisation of the NHS.

The chapter shows the benefits of qualitative research into specific manifestations information technology. It explains how apparently ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ quantitative data gathering and analysis is mediated by complex software practices. It considers the political power of claims that data is neutral.

The chapter provides insight into a specific case of healthcare data and. It makes explicit the role of politics and the State in digitisation and shows how STS approaches can be used to understand political and technological practice.

Shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) across the United States at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic created entrepreneurial opportunities for sewists and makers. In the United States in March and April 2020, masks were not readily available to the general public from existing retailers and PPE for medical use was being rationed for healthcare workers. Sewists and crafters, professionals and amateurs alike, began making and selling and/or donating masks. For individuals with sewing skills and time, sewing and selling masks became a lifeline financially, personally, and socially. To understand the experiences of people who made and distributed handmade masks during the early months of the pandemic in the United States, an interdisciplinary team developed an online cross-sectional survey instrument using a qualitative-dominated approach with both open and closed questions. This chapter explores themes identified from a sample of 94 participants, predominantly female-identifying, who created an enterprise or added a product line to an existing business. The sample includes individuals who did not identify as a ‘creative entrepreneur’ prior to the pandemic but did identify as an entrepreneur after starting a mask-making venture. Informed by entrepreneurship literature, the authors observed that these nascent entrepreneurs articulated recognisable motivations for social entrepreneurship, showed signs of pre-existing entrepreneurial mindsets, and employed business models and marketing tactics of entrepreneurs, largely without any business training. Implications for the study include increased recognition of latent entrepreneurial readiness, interest of women in social entrepreneurship, and higher levels of business knowledge among women than previously recognised.

Purpose – This study analyzes the rhetoric casting U.S. President Barack Obama in the role of betraying and undermining the nation because he seeks government policies supporting a social safety net, gay rights, abortion rights, and other progressive agendas.

Methodology/Approach – The analysis is based on sociological social movement theories, especially the interrelationship of ideology, frames, and narratives in understanding how activists take their ideas and turn them in to action. The power devaluation model of Rory McVeigh is applied to the construction of reality used by right-wing anti-Obama forces, especially those linked to the various Tea Party movements.

Findings – The most militant anti-Obama ideologues construct frames and narratives based on a dualistic worldview in which Obama and liberals in general are demonized and scapegoated for existing economic, social, and political problems.

Research limitations/implications – More scholarly research using statistical analysis of the views and demographics of Tea Party supporters is needed to provide a complete picture of this new social/political movement.

Practical implications – By showing that right-wing populists are basing their beliefs on a long history of similar frames and narratives, this study can help prompt a more constructive response by political opponents who wrongly demonize the Tea Party supporters and their allies as ignorant or crazy.

Poor health conditions are a major factor in perpetuating poverty on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This chapter explores the ways in which market-based health care delivery systems shirk health care costs of Lakota households on the periphery of the market economy. Furthermore, the economic value of health care services provided by these same marginal households is understated because market-based health care privileges commodified biomedicine. Examining economic activity beyond formal market integration reveals how households least able to bear the costs of health care subsidize the market economy at the expense of their own efforts to move out of poverty.

Healthcare provision in Denmark reflects some of the key principles of the welfare state. By securing relatively easy and equal access for all Danish residents regardless of income via general tax financing, the Danish healthcare system has strong ethical merits. All residents are entitled to comprehensive healthcare services. The Danish healthcare system is also relatively efficient. Total healthcare expenditures – including public and private – amount to 10% of GDP, above the OECD 8.8% average but well below the costs in the other Nordic countries, Germany, Switzerland and the United Stated. Notwithstanding its merits, healthcare in Denmark shares key predicaments with other OECD countries, primarily how to improve health outcomes while containing care expenditures. All of the OECD countries aim to improve population life expectancy and health quality. Yet their ageing and increasingly obese populations are exacerbating the demands on their respective healthcare systems. This chapter examines changes in how Denmark has managed these challenges. The main argument is that the healthcare system performance on managing health outcomes and costs improved remarkably from the 1990s to the early 2020s, although outcome inequalities remain. Notable changes in the system were targeted innovations in treatment procedures and expansion of municipal rehabilitation and preventive efforts, along with strict budget controls.