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Healthcare is a vast field of
varied functional business areas; composed of a myriad of
business principles, policies, processes, practices, and
procedures. Healthcare, as an industry, consists of
manufacturing for: artificial body components, diagnosis and
treatment equipment, and drugs and medications. It also has a
logistics aspect as related to: the tracking and delivery of
medical supplies, prepositioning of medical equipment, and the
unique transport of injured people. The area most commonly known
includes the wide field of healthcare specialties and
subspecialties, including: research, development, education, and
delivery of care that covers preventative, curative, cosmetic,
critical care, or optional and elective treatments and
surgeries. The United States Bureau of Labor and Statistics
wrote, “As the largest industry in 2006, health care provided 14
million jobs – 13.6 million jobs for wage and salary workers and
about 438,000 jobs for the self-employed.” 1 It is
the very size of this industry makes it so difficult to define
in a short statement, leading not to the lack of definitions but
to the abundance of definitions; a few of which are:
1. The World Health
Organization (WHO), “Health is a state of complete physical,
mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of
disease or infirmity.”2
2. The American Heritage
Medical Dictionary, “The prevention, treatment, and management
of illness and the preservation of mental and physical
well-being through the services offered by the medical and
allied health professions.”3
3. Wikipedia, “Health
care, or healthcare, refers to the treatment and management of
illness, and the preservation of health through services offered
by the medical, dental, pharmaceutical, clinical laboratory
sciences (in vitro diagnostics), nursing, and allied
health professions. Health care embraces all the goods and
services designed to promote health, including preventive,
curative and palliative interventions, whether directed to
individuals or to populations.” 4
The industry of healthcare,
whether publicly or privately practiced, eludes simple
definition.
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References
1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Office of Occupational
Statistics and Employment Projections Suite 2135, 2
Massachusetts Avenue, NE Washington, DC 20212-0001,
http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs035.htm
2. Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization
as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York,
19-22 June, 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives
of 61 States (Official Records of the World Health Organization,
no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948,
http://www.who.int/about/definition/en/print.html
3. The American Heritage® Medical Dictionary Copyright © 2007,
2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin
Company,
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/health%20care
4.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare, This page was last
modified on 12 July 2009 at 19:20 |
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