This is my response to a question concerning the relative value of Graduate Degrees for Hospital Administration,(MHA vs. MBA).  I am not an expert on professional Healthcare education.

 I have spent 5 years in academia teaching graduate students in both disciplines. It has been my experience that both degrees provide essential tool to meet the challenges within the profession.

For a case study I direct you to my latest book on Amazon “DEADLY NEGLECT: Apathy and Denial vs. Act of God”, Aug 4 2011. It is an ugly story of the Public Health and Healthcare Sector’s response to Hurricane Katrina. Contrary to some industry accounts, it has no “Executive level Profiles in Courage”. 

Abandoned by the system, brave groups of nurses re-live their day-to-day struggle to care for their vulnerable life-support-dependent inpatients, in the face of an environment that included flooding, no electricity for life-support, no plumbing, armed gangs roaming the facility, exhausted medication, food, and water supplies, and makeshift morgues in various locations of the hospital.

All the hospitals in the New Orleans area were accredited by CMS-contracted external evaluation organizations and fully aware of the findings of the million dollar All-Hazards exercise “PAM” a year before Katrina, which turned out to be a close “clone” of what was to become the Katrina disaster. For a better part of a week, the City authorities along with local, regional and national healthcare leadership (FACHEs, MBAs, MHAs, PhDs, MDs, DOs and or combinations of these) watched the hour-by-hour approaching storm mesmerized by what they saw. 

The City Hospital Council, State Hospital Association and State Health Department and other healthcare authorities failed to make the timely decision to evacuate their hospitals and hundreds of frail, elderly hospital and nursing home patients suffered horrible deaths.  It is not the degree on the wall or the certificates in the lobby, it is the degree of Character and Integrity. JB