Many calls to transformation

Health Progress, Sep/Oct 2001 by Van Schaik, Terry

In this final year of the current plan, CHA articulates and accepts a challenge for itself: to unite

as a ministry "to transform communities, public policy, and the delivery of health care."

Sometimes a word just seems to be in the air. You hear the word on the drive to work, a friend uses it at lunch, you catch it again on the late night news. Such is the case with the word "transform" -used in several articles in this issue of Health Progress. Most dramatically, perhaps, the word appears in CHA's 1999-2002 Strategic Plan and Year Three Operations Plan. In this final year of the current plan, CHA articulates and accepts a challenge for itself. to unite as a ministry "to transform communities, public policy, and the delivery of health care." To learn more about the association's plan to leverage its collective capacity to bring about transformational change, see the Strategic Plan beginning on p. 54.

The word transform and its derivatives rumble through this issue's special section, "Negotiating the Health Care Market with Integrity," which we thank Ann Neale, PhD, for guest editing. Multiple authors identify conflicts that arise in health care when markets and health care values collide. Articles such as those by Judith Feder, PhD, and Roberto Dell'Oro, STD, identify the need for transformational change in the health care system.

Jack Glaser, STD, and Brian Glaser, PhD, join special section authors in identifying the need to transform the current U.S. health care system, which allows 39.3 million to live without access to care. The authors challenge Catholic health care and particularly sponsors to recognize that, although laudable, direct service to the poor is not enough. Only sweeping reform-transformation-of the health care system will do.