Review article
THE PURPOSES OF SOCIAL ACCOUNTING IN ITALIAN PUBLIC HEALTH ORGANIZATIONS
Sabrina Gigli
Marco Tieghi
Abstract
In recent years, within the panorama of Italian public organization, information and management tools are making their mark. They have been certainly for a long time already used in private enterprises, and may be traced back to the will/necessity to provide an answer to a communications need that is definitely directed towards the social field.
Public health organization find themselves as part of those organization mentioned above, and the number of subjects who have decided or who have been “forced” to adopt the social report – or tools similar to it – is, by now, noteworthy.
The current work aims to analyse the “mission statement” project carried out by the Emilia-Romagna Region for the purpose of verifying how it shapes out not just as an accountability tool, but also (or perhaps especially) as a tool whose aim is to support the mechanisms of governance within the regional health system.
If, by way of the mission statement, the public health organizations of Emilia and Romagna have to “account” for the level of achievement of the aims attributed to them by the Region and by the area social and health Conferences within the exercise of their respective functions, having defined a model for the “final balance” representation induces effects on the organization planning and programming tools too, via which such aims have to be able to be made obtainable.
However, wherever we consider the “instrumental” function, that the organizations here examined have for the pursuit of the “system objectives” of the regional health service, we must also consider the effects produced on the planning and programming processes of who has governance responsibility (the Region), and of who has locally functions of policy-maker, of objective co-definition, and of verifying the outcomes of their institutional activity (the area social and health Conferences, to be precise).
Keywords
public heath organization; accountability and governance; mission statement; social report
Hrčak ID:
97016
URI
Publication date:
1.9.2012.
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