MINISTERUL EDUCATIEI, CERCETARII SI INOVARII

UNIVERSITATEA 1 DECEMBRIE 1918 ALBA IULIA

FACULTATEA DE ISTORIE SI FILOLOGIE
SPECIALIZAREA : LIMBA SI COMUNICARE IN ADMINISTRAREA AFACERILOR IN
LIMBA ENGLEZA

RESEARCH PAPER ON PRAGMATICS

Masterand :
PURTATOR DIANA DANIELA
Anul 1

ALBA IULIA
IUNIE, 2009

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The text is from an exercice: Bob Obee; Virginia Evans; Upstream-upper Intermediate,
Express Publishing, 2003

Doctors and managers have to make tough decisions about what services to provide

from their budgets. Economic approaches can help, but they also need to take into account the

practical and ethical challenges faced by healthcare professionals.

Doctors and managers in hospitals and primary care have to manage competing claims

on their limited budgets. They have to decide what services to fund and what not to fund as

well as the extent of funding. Extra resources will not remove the fundamental need to make

such choices because healthcare needs and wants will always outstrip the resources available.

Economic approaches to resource management at the local level have had limited

success, partly because economists have failed to consider properly the practical challenges

that managers and doctors face in making rational priority setting decisions.

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 I choose this text because it has a relation with economy we can say because this text
speaks about budgets of medical services. I found just literary texts and I said that I need one
text that should have a relation with our economic courses. It is a text from a course book for
college that has a variety of texts in it, most of them have economic themes. This book helped
me very much with examples of letters of application and with some economical reports.
Pragmatics is the study of signs and symbols as elements of communication.
Pragmatic considerations reflect the practical challenges that managers and doctors
face in managing resources and will determine whether the priority setting process results in
actual changes to the amounts and types of health care provided. They relate to establishing
organisational objectives, understanding organisational context and ensuring organisational
readiness, establishing an appropriate advisory panel, and ensuring that the implementation of
results is feasible.
The objectives of the organisation should be established at the beginning. Establishing
these objectives requires careful consideration of three inter-related issues. Firstly, managers
and doctors within the organisation may have multiple objectives, for example, clinical
effectiveness, equity, or cultural appropriateness. Secondly, objectives should reflect local
priorities but also be compatible with national and regional policies. Thirdly, organisations
will have different short and long term objectives.
Perhaps the strongest challenge to any explicit, evidence based priority setting process
is that of organisational context and behaviour. Strong management leadership and clinical
champions are required for success. Priority setting should occur in a context of relative
organisational stability, with some degree of coherence in long term strategies for planning
across health services. Institutional boundaries, such as separate budgets for different types of
services, should be clearly established. A key question is whether stated objectives are
achievable within current institutional boundaries. If not, the objectives should be revised in
the short term. Incentive and sanction mechanisms, including remuneration and funding
mechanisms, should be identified, and their potential impact on resource management
decisions examined.
When we look up to establish the organisational objectives we find out: multiple
objectives like effectiveness, equity and trade-offs between objectives; hierarchical objectives
like provider, local, regional, and national levels; and finally inter-temporal objectives for
short and long term.

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The text has very good organized the reforms having for them some dates referring to time
and stability, to consumers, to community, to managers that are sure.
Managers and doctors must accept the key concepts that underline programme
budgeting and marginal analysis and other economic approaches to priority setting. Successful
application of priority setting methods requires a degree of integration between funding and
priority setting mechanisms. If priority setting mechanisms conflict with funding mechanisms
at local or regional levels, or with budget setting mechanisms within provider organisations,
priority setting is unlikely to lead to changes in the allocation of resources.
We can find in this text some types of maxims: of quantity, of quality, of relation and
of manner.
The maxim of quantity is found when we talk about how many sentences that contain
information give the text and how many sentences need the readers to understand the
information from the text. This rule is required for the conversation to proceed. It should be
neither too little, nor too much. It is not clear how one can decide what quantity of
information satisfies the maxim in a given case, because not all readers are the same. The text
is not too long, it has main informations about medical economy. The text has sixteen lines
and there are not sentences that has the same meaning hundred percent.
The maxim of quality is also found in this text because we think of what information
sends the message, if is real or not,if it is true or false. They should not say what they think is
false, or make statements for which they have no evidence. Sentences are true because we
have written in the text Doctors and managers have to make tough decisions about what
services to provide from their budgets and Doctors and managers in hospitals and primary
care have to manage competing claims on their limited budgets.
The maxim of relation is also found in this text because speakers contributions are
related clearly to the purpose of the message.
This text avoid obscurity of expressions and avoid ambiguity of information too and in
this way we have the maxim of manner. We can say that the information presented in the text
has an order and is not very long, beeing in this way clear . The words are not unknown for
other person, are accesible for everyone, even the economic terms.
In conclusion I think that I made a pragmatic analysis, but I think that if I would
choose another text, a litterary one, I would get out more examples for each maxim.