Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand whether and how the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) paradigm can be useful in social reporting in the context of nonprofit healthcare organizations. In other words, the study deals with non-financial reporting and information, allowing external stakeholders to comprehensively evaluate the organization’s performance and behavior, investigating internal stakeholder perception over ESG paradigm application.Design/methodology/approach: The authors used a case study approach investigating four cases among nonprofit healthcare organizations in Italy. Analyses of available primary sources have been conducted, followed by semi-structured interviews. Interviews were then transcribed and coded in a joint blinded process by all authors. More specifically, three areas have been investigated: (1) factors motivating the development of non-financial disclosure practices; (2) the rationale behind the organization’s decision to include specific topics; and (3) the future perspective on the future of non-financial disclosure within the specific sector.Findings: ESG may serve as a suitable framework to create comparable documents that can act as benchmarks for similar institutions. However, while nonprofit organizations (NPOs) can draw inspiration from ESG, the utility of these criteria should be thoughtfully tailored to align with the organization’s mission. The ESG using as a general guide, instead of implementing it as a real tool to assess performances, emerges as a positive practice. NPOs should not focus on fulfilling ESG requirements bur rather take inspiration from them. Otherwise, the risk is an excess of focus on the formal aspect rather than on its content.Originality/value: The study contributes to a better understanding of social and ESG’ reporting activities and approaches in the healthcare sector by describing some case studies and the effect of sustainability in the social reporting of nonprofit healthcare organizations.

Health professionals are now required to develop skills that help them to achieve better organizational performance, in addition to the skills necessary to carry out their professional activities. The role of clinician-manager has thus grown rapidly in all the main industrialized countries. The purpose of this study is to investigate how healthcare professionals perceive their level of preparation in managerial skills. Analysing literature on managerial skills in the health sector, ten domains of skills emerged and were used to construct a questionnaire. A survey analysis was conducted among professionals from health organizations in two Italian regions. Independent t-tests were conducted and a one-way analysis of variance was performed in order to compare the self-assessment competency levels in selected subgroups of participants. Findings show that healthcare professionals feel sufficiently prepared in all managerial areas identified. However, they also suggest that health organizations should invest more in all managerial areas. Differences between self-perception of competence and need for training occur among managers and non-managers. The findings will be useful for top management and policy makers designing operational tools for intervention in human resource development, with the aim of providing appropriate training and skills for clinician-managers.

Healthcare organizations struggle to provide adequate assistance because of the scarcity of resources affecting National Health Systems (NHS) worldwide. It is necessary to find strategies to make the NHS sustainable. Funding cannot always be leveraged, and new variables need to be found. It is asked: What can and should be done in single health organizations to improve the efficacy of the NHS? To answer, several CEOs of Italian hospitals were interviewed. Results suggest that there is a widespread need for improvement of organizational aspects of professionals’ responsibilities, better coordination between health professionals, and in-service training. Several conclusions can be sketched by the analysis of interviews. Current possible NHS problems, as well as practical suggestions on how to improve it, are offered. Bureaucracy, slow decisional processes, and weak reward systems are seen as demons to fight. How? Reforming the regulation system, valorizing professional competencies, and placing stronger emphasis on organizations’ commitment.

Background: New Public Management theory affected reforms of public sectors worldwide. In Italy, an important reform of the healthcare sector changed the profile of public hospitals, creating new management related positions in 1992. The reform defined the role of the clinician-manager: a hybrid figure, in charge of managing an entire unit. This paper aims to investigate how much clinician-managers feel like managers and how much they still feel like professionals, using time as a driver to conduct the analysis. Methods: A survey-questionnaire was administered to a set of 2,011 clinician-managers employed in public hospitals, with a response rate of 60.42%. The managerial role of healthcare professionals in public hospitals: A time-driven analysis of their activities. The questionnaire aimed to identify the difference between how much time clinician-managers actually spend on daily activities and how much time they would think be appropriate. To better cluster different type of management styles, subgroups were identified based on the type of organisations respondents work for, geographical location, and professional specialty. Results: Findings suggest that clinician-managers spend more time on clinical activities than management. Clear differences are found according to professional specialty, and there are fewer differences in geographical location and the type of organisation. Conclusions: The absence of clear differences in the responses between different geographical areas implies that a shared organisational culture characterizes the whole sector. However, differences in how the clinician-manager role is perceived based on the professional specialty suggest that closer integration may be needed.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had wide-reaching societal and economic effects and a return to “normal” will take years to accomplish. In light of this situation, the most important advancement since COVID-19′s emergence has been the development of multiple, life-saving, vaccines. Academic research on vaccine has been extensive. It is estimated that in only one year it has been produced more published and indexed papers on this single issue than in the last twenty years on any other single issue, thus, necessitating some organization. This research consists of a systematic literature review of the social science publication on COVID-19 published in the first year of the pandemic (February 2020 to March 2021). This review is important because it occurs at a time when vaccines have begun their global distribution and the best efforts to address the pandemic is through vaccination programs. In this research, 53 papers published in relevant journals are analyzed out of the almost 30,000 articles retrieved from Scopus database. The analysis conducted relies on two different types: descriptive analysis (evolution at the time of citations; evolution over time of keywords; bibliographical mapping of countries, the top 10 most influential papers), and bibliometric analysis for content evaluation. A cluster analysis was performed for the latter. Clustering the research papers, based on the actual content of papers, found there to be five research areas: (1) economic aspects; (2) ethics and legal aspects; (3) health communication; (4) policies and crisis management, and (5) political issues. Yet, this article’s results paint a picture of literature that has not yet considered the full scope of COVID-19’s effect on the economic, political, and population level health and well-being. Nor has it considered these effects across the global community, suggesting new potential areas of research and giving a perspective of what we should expect for the future.

Purpose: Despite the advent of New Public Management theories over three decades ago, doubts persist regarding the practical implementation of these principles in the public health-care context. Challenges arise particularly from the type of system where this phenomenon is analyzed. In the Italian context, for instance, it can be arduous to define universally applicable organizational behaviors, given the interregional disparity that characterizes such a system. Furthermore, the professional identity of clinician-managers influences the perception of what “being a manager” means. This paper, thus, using the Italian context as a reference, aims to delineate what is the perception of Italian public hospitals clinician-middle-managers in terms of their responsibilities and tasks. Design/methodology/approach: A survey-questionnaire was distributed to 6,011 Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) in Italian public hospitals, representing 100% of such role holders in the country. With a response rate of 16.7%, 1,005 responses were obtained. The questionnaire assessed CMOs' attitudes toward specific activities relevant to clinician-management, ranked from most to least important. Activities were derived from literature and categorized to discern management styles. Subgroups based on geographical location and professional orientation were also identified to isolate regional effects and professional identity influences. Findings: Results suggested that activities associated with a collaborative approach are perceived as most important. Furthermore, it clearly emerges the difference based on professional orientation of CMOs. However, it could not be appreciated the same level of difference basing the analysis on regional disparities. Originality/value: The interest in the role of middle management in healthcare organizations has increased over the years. Nevertheless, currently the authors believe that not many studies are focused on defining what “being a manager” means for clinician-managers themselves, rather than explaining what clinician-managers shall do.