Public Hospital Systems

With sixteen hospitals and almost 10,500 beds, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation(HHC) is the largest municipal hospital system in the United States. With forty-seven hospitals and almost thirty-three thousand beds, the Paris Hospital Corporation, Assistance Publique-Hopitaux de Paris(AP), is three times as large, the biggest municipal hospital system in France. This book compares these two vast systems. It analyzes staffing, outpatient and inpatient care, the desirability of private faculty practice plans, budgeting, quality assurance, and the role of medical education in these two very different systems. In addition, it reviews how both HHC and AP plan to adapt their systems over the next decade and beyond. Aging populations, the development and diffusion of new medical technologies, and the growth of hospitals and physicians throughout the 1960s and 1970s have led to massive increases in health care costs in both the United States and in France. Both New York City and Paris have suffered the shock of the AIDS epidemic. Detailed, informed, and authoritative, this book will stand for years as the standard comparative study of two large municipal hospital systems.