Corporate psychopaths in the health and aged care sectors

Corporate psychopathy has typically been understood as likely to occur in the finance sector, government and manufacturing. The health (both clinical and research) sector and, to a lesser extent, public/private sector aged care services have been construed as different, consistent with perceptions of altruism, professional ethics, multifaceted regulation and the motivation of participants in organisations understood as benevolent caregivers. This chapter suggests that factors such as the bureaucratisation of health services, oligopolies and the ongoing marketisation of aged care mean that corporate psychopaths are likely to be discernible in those sectors, rewarded and inadequately addressed through light-touch regulation founded on assumptions that all participants are committed to ‘doing no harm’.