Business or patients? Five lectures on healthcare in chaos

Dr Gerald Arbuckle

As politicians and health professionals debate the future of healthcare in Britain, a leading Catholic consultant in the public health system will be delivering five lectures in Oxford over the next few weeks.

Dr Gerald Arbuckle, a Marist priest based in Australia, will be the speaker for the 2011 Martin D'Arcy Memorial Lectures at Campion Hall, Oxford, starting on Wednesday, 2 February and continuing on the subsequent four Wednesdays, from 5pm to 6.30pm.

In the series of lectures entitled Healthcare in Chaos: Models in Conflict, he will argue that human values are increasingly being ignored in the reform of health systems as in the USA, Australia and the NHS in England.

"There is an over-emphasis on the business side of healthcare," Dr Arbuckle said. "The consequences are: the welfare of patients is being jeopardised, tribal tensions between clinicians and managers, bullying behaviour at all levels, and the poorer sections of society are neglected. Unless leaders are able to re-focus on the founding values of public healthcare, these problems will intensify."

Dr Arbuckle is a Cambridge graduate in social anthropology, who has researched, and written extensively, on the role of organisational leadership in the midst of rapid cultural change.

The lecture series is named after Fr Martin D'Arcy SJ (1888-1976), a Jesuit priest, a philosopher and public figure, who was Master of Campion Hall from 1933 to 1945.

Source: Jesuit Communications