The final chapter compares The Villages to other retirement communities, aging in place, and aging in community. Drawing on the study’s findings and the perceptions of interviewed individuals, it highlights how The Villages’ unique characteristics – including its size, innovation culture, bubble communication, opportunities for meaningful involvement, social networks, and communal coping – generally enhance residents’ well-being. The chapter also summarizes The Villages’ weaknesses and presents key takeaways about the societal meanings of its success.

Leadership is an elusive concept. Key authors cannot agree on the characteristics of leaders, but all agree that leadership is about relationships and evolves over time. For example, Rost and Barker state that ‘leadership is an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes and outcomes that reflect a shared purpose’. Meanwhile, Landsdale suggests that ‘effective leaders enable people to move in the same direction, toward the same destinations, at the same speed, but not because they have been forced to, but because they want to’. This raises the question of how we get people to want to go in the same direction and at the same pace. In the health services, this is particularly challenging because of the multidisciplinary nature of the key stakeholders. It requires appropriate leadership of interprofessional teams.

A 2021 report on a study of workplace conflict in the United Kingdom concludes that, in 2018–19, more than 35 per cent of respondents reported workplace conflict, with an estimated 485 000 employees resigning as a result. Managers need to understand that conflict does not resolve itself; rather, it tends to gather intensity and energy. Gupta, Boyd and Kuzmits have found that ‘employees spend as much as 42 percent of their time engaging in or attempting to resolve conflict and 20 percent of managers’ time is taken up by conflict-related issues’. Managing conflict is one of the primary responsibilities of managing staff and teams, particularly in multicultural work environments. Understanding what is ‘culturally normative in terms of self-worth, confrontation, emotional expression, and managerial intervention can help [staff] involved in workplace conflict understand what they are experiencing’. Additionally, it can help managers intervene appropriately. In this chapter, different types and origins of conflict are discussed, as well as approaches to managing and resolving conflict.

This chapter explores the notion of ethics and ethical decision-making frameworks in leading and managing health services. Chapter 1 outlined the four sets of skills, or functions, that every manager should possess, which are usually summarised under the acronym POLC: planning, organising, leading and controlling. With leadership being one of the four functions of management, it is important to understand both the management and the leadership aspects of ethical decision-making.

The past three decades have seen the rise of clinical governance, firstly as a concept and ultimately as a system. Increasing knowledge of the scope of iatrogenic harm to consumers, coupled with public inquiries into poor care around the world, is driving the development of governance of clinical care into an established component of corporate governance. Many gains are being realised in Australia, including a reduction in infections and preventable, in-hospital cardiac arrests, improved experience and outcomes for patients, better governance of clinical care and more meaningful involvement of patients and consumers in health care.

In a text on leadership and management in health services, human resource management requires a strategic approach. Health is dominated by a large, diverse and highly professionalised workforce. Human resource management is complex and focuses on the performance effects of human resource systems rather than individual human resource practices. The focus is on systems since employees are exposed to an interrelated set of human resource practices which, in turn, are dependent on other multiple sets of systems within the wider health service.

Project management (PM) is a systematic management tool with techniques to bring people and resources together for a single purpose. Since its emergence in the architectural, engineering and building sectors in the early 1900s, PM has been systematically applied to other fields and industries as a common tool in managing work and achieving needed change. The rapidly changing operating environment and the frequent, system-wide and large-scale transformation in the health and community care sector has inevitably changed the PM landscape. In the past 10 years, PM has experienced significant growth in complexity and scope in health and community care. The significant increase in the number of projects undertaken and the investment in developing PM competencies and tools have contributed to the growing project maturity in healthcare organisations. PM has been broadly used to implement change, trial new service models, develop new programs and technologies, and improve organisational structure and care processes.

The healthcare sector is continually confronted with the issue of how to manage with less. In response, health leaders and managers must explore and use new ways to face such challenges. These issues ultimately affect the quality and safety, and the productivity and efficiency, of the health services delivered. Within each organisation, the effectiveness of the leadership and culture directly affect the quality of patient care delivered. To effectively address such challenges, leaders have begun to adopt new strategies and roles that focus on visioning and creativity.

California is often seen as a homogeneous entity that uniformly values environmentalism and climate action. This image universalizes the idea of climate change and detaches it from its cultural and political settings. It also obscures how the localization of environmental policy and science within the state involves processes of public contestation and legitimation. This chapter examines the culturally contingent nature of climate policy – the assumptions and worldviews that often create conflict between community understandings of local environmental conditions and the prevailing global regulatory culture of climate change. I argue that through a reoccurring process of conflict and collaboration, a broad range of individuals and organizations is co-constituting what climate change and environmental justice mean. California’s climate change programs are fostered by certain conditions of privilege – a robust economy, racial and ethnic plurality, and progressive statewide leaders. Nonetheless, they offer clear models of how to broaden climate change worldviews and imagine various relationships among the atmosphere, economic and racial disparities, and climate change policy.

Chapter 8 turns to a paired comparison of secondhand smoke prevention policies, which offer a more optimistic picture of sociolegal change. In addition to more nonsmoking rules, changing social norms and declining smoking rates were conducive to realizing reforms—and benefited from them. This chapter details the contributions of tobacco control advocates through lobbying, educational activities, and lawsuits related to secondhand smoke, especially in workplaces and at subnational levels. Their multi sited activism is a necessary part of understanding why one is now much less likely to be exposed to secondhand smoke in Korea and Japan.

To care for the 14,000 black infantrymen, a new hospital opened when the men arrived. Equipped with state-of-the-art material, it employed the best black doctors in the country, recruited by the Surgeon General’s office. It offered all the features of Deluxe Jim Crow, black excellence in a segregated setting. During the war, it offered the best care possible to men whose health was often shaky, and provided a safe haven for those seeking to escape a racially biased discipline.