What an exciting day – my first blog entry for my newly inaugurated website!

So the blog experts say that I should begin with a brief introduction.

I am an architect who has specialized in the healthcare field my entire career.  That includes hospitals, medical academies, nursing homes, research labs, blah, blah, blah.  Boring to most, but this building type has always energized me.  There is a tension between healthy staff and sick patients, cutting edge technology and age old remedies, cozy healing environments and sterile surroundings.  But most importantly I can do my part in healing and comforting fellow human beings.  My mother never got her son the doctor (cadavers – yuch!) but she did get the next best thing.

After many years designing such facilities, I broadened my horizons by moving from the drafting table to the construction management side of the process and then on to program management (running the entire process from start to finish.  Sort of an owner’s rep (representative) on steroids).  While I was always based in New York, my projects were across North America and even international.  I always thought I had a global perspective about healthcare facilities until last year…..

In 2009 I left NY and moved to the other side of the world.  It was time for some adventure and the US scene was feeling a bit limited.  After a year and a half I am beginning to really understand the global healthcare market.  My “Ameri-centric” perspective was so limited that I’m embarrassed to think about it.  Not everything in the world should be viewed in comparison to “how we do it in the USA.”

Healthcare is like a great organism which slowly moves and changes across the globe.  In one part of the world it seeks to shrink its inpatient services and expand its outpatient services while in another part of the world it is doing just the opposite.  One area is struggling with too many patient beds while another part suffers from patients sleeping in corridors.  One country is trying to socialize its health system while another attempts to privatize it.

I am finally starting to see the world as one great big healthcare amoeba, or maybe a protozoa – I never did well in biology which is why I am not a doctor.  Either one, it is not a world organization as much as it is a world organism and I am enjoying my current studies in dissecting that organism and learning how it works.

I think I like this blogging.  See you next time.