Doug Carpenter, administrator of Eastern University Hospital, fights physician greed and power politics while trying to provide a good setting for patient care. 

Doug's boss, Stan Boswell, Vice-President for Health at the university, has been directed by the board to build a new hospital. Boswell has singleness of purpose and narrowness of vision. He believes the way to accomplish the mission is to appease the more powerful members of the medical staff. 

A union organizing effort explodes into this setting, led by Simba Agiza (a Swahili name she adopted meaning Black Lion). She'll do anything to end what she calls exploitation of employees. She tries to seduce Doug so she can expose and destroy him. 

Concurrently, the death rate in the hospital increases until it exceeds the national norm. One of the deaths is clearly a murder. A beautiful Hispanic nurse, Juanita Martinez, is a suspect, as is an East Indian physician, Dr. Jeep. Both are recipients in the will left by the murdered patient. 

The hospital pathologist resigns after he carelessly stores highly explosive chemicals in the hallway; a neglected patient commits suicide because he has a mental disease that neither he nor his parents understand; a quadriplegic patient is abandoned behind an ampitheatre stage; a drunk anesthesiologist kills a mother during the delivery of her child; a state licensure inspector is compromised by a doctor's secretary and blackmailed. 

A strike erupts. Pickets surround the building. A doctor is injured crossing the picket-line. A female goon brutalizes two nurses. 

The doctors, seeing their own referrals and payments interrupted, press Doug and Boswell to give in to excessive union demands. A contract, unfavorable to the hospital, is reached in spite of Doug, because the university's chief negotiator makes compromises to make himself look good. 

These are only some of the obstacles Doug faces.