Table 1.

Disentangling the differences between traditional and PC hospitals

	Functional hospital configuration	More recent innovations: converging patterns towards PC hospitals
Organizational model/ care delivery model	Functional/divisional model	Lean organization/process-oriented model
Organizational unit: patients’ care needs and the relationship among specialties	Specialty-based units. Practitioners (doctors and nurses) are grouped into semi-autonomous units depending on their specialty of belonging	Multi-specialty units. Units are aggregated in accordance with patients’ clinical and assistential needs. Doctors might treat patients located in different units and nurses might assist patients with different pathologies
Model of care	Functional nursing (nurses’ task-oriented job: each nurse is specialized in a single care activity)	Modular nursing (nurses are responsible for the overall assistential practices required by small groups of patients within the ward)
Use of resources	Separated resources (beds, operating rooms, equipment, nursing staff, other staff) devoted to the individual specialties	Resource pooling: resources are shared by all the functional specialties regrouped
Managerial roles	Head physicians in charge of their departments	Bed manager/case manager (as distinguished by the clinical activity) for centralized operation management
Physical environment	Hospitals are built around fixed and focused spaces, with often isolated wings	Newly built hospitals are designed to maximize resource pooling and patient grouping, flexibility and modularity of spaces