Healthcare Administration

Unit 1, Historical Overview

Tony Johnson

HCM630-1203A-01 Healthcare Administration

June 10, 2012

Robert Nobles

Abstract

Hospitals have become commonplace in the American landscape. The ability to provide healing along with individual well-being has become a mainstay of the system. This will account the history along with comparisons’ to hospital systems abroad.

Introduction

As is known, hospitals provide an invaluable service to the public. When one thinks of hospitals, surgery along with emergency rooms immediately comes to mind. However, this is just the tip of the ice burg when it comes to services provided. So, how did we get to this point and what lies ahead where healthcare and hospital services are concerned? In the following pages we will explore these questions.

Hospitals’ in history

Hospitals can be traced back to early Jewish times prior to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Later in Byzantine times and the reign of Constantine where hospitals were considered a pauper arena. Simply put, it gathered the poor in order to remove them from the elements along with societies view. During the Middle Ages the hospital ideas were taken to the Persian court by the Greeks, from here hospitals were established along with medical schools and became the model for future establishments in Islam. From this point, the idea of hospitals carried on outside the region to Northern Africa and further in the Middle East (Horden, 2005).

By the time the first settlers came to America, Europe had established a top notch (at that time) healthcare system. According to Brownson (2007), settlers that first came to America had no hospitals or healthcare. No doctors were available; medications available were items that were brought with them on their journey along with what was known as “barber surgeons”. This is exactly what it implies, a barber who also did surgery, thus the red stripe on barber poles. Within America the first structures were...