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To underscore the significance of international health care management, we focus on three themes: the problem of global blindness; global health care challenges and opportunities; and learning from international health care management. The problem of global blindness highlights how health care managers’ inattentional blindness to competitors’ operational performance and market strategies lead to avoidable and expensive failures. To address global challenges and opportunities, health care organizations are employing two different strategies: (1) building and marketing a world-class health care facility internationally, and (2) organizing and integrating multinational health care operations. The first strategy exploits the medical-tourism market. The second strategy requires either multinational health care networks or transnational health care organizations. One of the lessons to be learned from international health care management is that an organization can create a meta-national competitive advantage. Another lesson is that by examining best practices from around the world, health care organizations can obtain new insights and become more innovative within their home markets. A corollary and third lesson is that while health care organizations can learn a great deal from examining international best clinical practices, sometimes the most important management lessons are lost in clinical translations. The fourth and last lesson is that worst cases – serious international management failures – offer perhaps the most valuable insights into the role of culture, complexity, and leadership for health care organizations.

Building a quality teaching force depends fundamentally upon attracting suitable candidates into teaching. This translates into transparent and clear policies and procedures for recruitment and transfers. Teacher recruitment and transfer are significant aspects of teacher management in Indian states because of the size and the differences that exist in different locations, in terms of facilities including access to health care services, higher educational institutions, and also transport and mobility. The presence or absence of these facilities and services determine the perceived quality for teachers, especially as it also determines their and the family members’ (including spouse and children) ability to access education, health care, or job market. This makes the recruitment and transfer policy a critical aspect of teacher management that contributes significantly to the motivation and job satisfaction of the teacher. Karnataka was able to make progress on designing and implementing transparent and effective teacher recruitment and transfer policies and move away from a system plagued by the weaknesses exhibited by other states. This chapter undertakes a historical analysis of teacher recruitment and transfers in the state, examines the determinants that led to current policies and an examination of the on-going changes since the policy was first introduced. Using Karnataka’s example, it argues that effective and efficient teacher management systems can lead to better teacher quality.

Disparities in transplant rates across social categories provide limited information about gatekeeping processes in access to kidney transplantation. We hypothesized that early opportunities for discussion of kidney transplantation potentially generate social capital that serves as a resource for patients as they navigate the transplantation pathway.

A national sample of first-year dialysis patients was surveyed and asked if kidney transplantation had been discussed with them before and after starting dialysis treatment. Associations between reported discussion and patient-specific clinical and nonclinical (sociodemographic) indicators of attributed utility for transplantation were investigated, and the association of reported transplant discussion with subsequent transplant waitlisting was analyzed.

Time to placement on the kidney transplant waiting list was significantly shorter for patients who reported that transplantation had been discussed with them before, as well as after, starting dialysis. Likelihood of reported discussion varied by patient age, employment and insurance status, cardiovascular comorbidity burden, and perceived health status; in addition, women were less likely to report early discussion.

It would be valuable to know more about the nature of the transplant discussions recalled by patients to better understand how social capital may be fostered through these discussions.

Indicators of attributed utility for successful transplantation were associated with transplant discussion both before and after starting dialysis, potentially contributing to observed disparities in access to kidney transplantation.

Predialysis nephrology care and patient participation in discussion of kidney transplantation may foster social capital that facilitates navigating the transplantation pathway.

The research analyzes good practices in health care “management experimentation models,” which fall within the broader range of the integrative public–private partnerships (PPPs). Introduced by the Italian National Healthcare System in 1991, the “management experimentation models” are based on a public governance system mixed with a private management approach, a patient-centric orientation, a shared financial risk, and payment mechanisms correlated with clinical outcomes, quality, and cost-savings. This model makes public hospitals more competitive and efficient without affecting the principles of universal coverage, solidarity, and equity of access, but requires higher financial responsibility for managers and more flexibility in operations.

In Italy the experience of such experimental models is limited but successful. The study adopts the case study methodology and refers to the international collaboration started in 1997 between two Italian hospitals and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC – Pennsylvania, USA) in the field of organ transplants and biomedical advanced therapies.

The research allows identifying what constitutes good management practices and factors associated with higher clinical performance. Thus, it allows to understand whether and how the management experimentation model can be implemented on a broader basis, both nationwide and internationally. However, the implementation of integrative PPPs requires strategic, cultural, and managerial changes in the way in which a hospital operates; these transformations are not always sustainable.

The recognition of ISMETT’s good management practices is useful for competitive benchmarking among hospitals specialized in organ transplants and for its insights on the strategies concerning the governance reorganization in the hospital setting. Findings can be used in the future for analyzing the cross-country differences in productivity among well-managed public hospitals.

Much progress has been made in public opinion regarding drug prohibition. The policy has been an utter failure, very expensive, and increasingly disliked by people around the world. As a result, several states have passed drug reform legislation that reduces penalties for the production, distribution, and consumption of previously prohibited substances such as narcotics and marijuana. Other states have placed more resources in drug treatment programs (demand reduction) instead of drug interdiction efforts (supply reduction). In North America, several states in the US and Canada have passed medical marijuana legislation to take advantage of the well-known medical benefits of marijuana (Piper, Matthew, Katherine, & Rebecca, 2003).

This study examined dimensions of young-adulthood development in lived experience reported by young persons (19 women, 18 men) with the disabling condition of kidney failure requiring chronic dialysis or kidney transplantation. In semistructured phone interviews, participants (ages 23–37) described their family/living situation, employment and community activity, current situation, and experience. Participants' qualitative responses about “the way you see things, do things, feel about things” and “how you feel about yourself” were examined to identify themes. Limited achievement of proposed “successful” dimensions of young adulthood characterized the study cohort, based on indicators included in the interview. In qualitative data, the theme of perceived stigma and spoiled identity (Goffman, 1963) was reflected in comments offered by participants regarding their self-confidence and motivation to pursue goals. A second theme in participants' qualitative responses was a sense of isolation from age peers who shared their condition, and participants expressed frustration around having an age-inappropriate condition (“why me?”). Perceived stigma and spoiled identity impact social ties and life goals and are understudied influences in the life course trajectory of young persons with kidney failure and the challenges inherent in navigating health status and developmental life course transitions.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to scrutinize the apparent alliance between international and local disability rights movements by contextualizing the process in which the disability rights model is being diffused globally. It seeks to critically examine the transplantation and promotion of the international disability rights movement's rights-based model in China.

Approach: This chapter draws from 18 in-depth interviews with local and international disability rights activists through multisite ethnographic fieldwork in China in 2019.

Findings: This chapter finds that despite opening up spaces for resistance and emancipation locally, the international disability rights movement nevertheless constitutes what I call an enclave of rights that insulates the international rights model from the political, social, and economic realities on the ground. In the case of China, the authoritarian politics that define the relationship between the state and civil society, as well as the economic vulnerability of people with disabilities in the post-socialist market economy, limit, if not invalidate, the rights model espoused by the international disability rights movement.

Implications: The findings of this chapter challenge and complicate the current scholarship of the transnational disability rights movement beyond its normative claims of emancipation. They also explore potential spaces and direction for building a new transnational alliance that takes into account the local experience of disability in a rapidly globalized world.