It is vital for healthcare leaders to have a clear sense of which leadership ideas and practices are rooted in sound theory and convincing evidence, and which are more speculative. This book provides a coherent set of six lenses through which to scrutinise the leadership literature relevant to healthcare - leadership concepts, characteristics, contexts, challenges, capabilities and consequences. It offers a view of leadership beyond the traditional focus on the individual, and argues instead that leadership has to be understood and developed as a complex set of practices by many people within specific organisational and inter-organisational contexts and cultures.
NHS reform continues to be a topical yet contentious issue in the UK. Reforming healthcare: What’s the evidence? is the first major critical overview of the research published on healthcare reform in England from 1990 onwards by a team of leading UK health policy academics. It explores work considering the Conservative internal market of the 1990s and New Labour’s healthcare reorganizations, including its attempts at performance management and the reintroduction of market-based reform from 2004 to 2010. It then considers the implications of this research for current debates about healthcare reorganization in England, and internationally. As the most up-to-date summary of what research says works in English healthcare reform, this essential review is aimed at anyone interested in the wide-ranging debates about health reorganization, but especially students and academics interested in social policy, public management and health policy.
99 SIx The healthcare consumer Martin Powell and Ian Greener introduction Conceptualising users of health services remains a contentious issue. On the one hand, some authors have claimed that ‘the essential problem with the healthcare industry is that it has been shielded from consumer control – by employers, insurers and the government’ (Herzlinger, 2002, in Spiers, 2003, p 6). On the other hand, however, writers such as Titmuss (1968) and Stacey (1976) argued that the consumer has no place in healthcare (see Clarke et al, 2007; Le Grand, 2007; Needham
Health policy thinking must change. This book explores the fundamental currents and tensions that lie behind recent trends such as shared decision-making, co-production, and personalisation.
These are often discussed in relation to an epidemiological transition but this text argues that they embody a philosophical transition – a change in our conceptions of healthcare and of appropriate forms of knowledge and analysis. As clinical concerns are increasingly nested within social concerns then policy analysis must engage with the multiple philosophical tensions that are now centre stage.
This focus on key underlying ideas and tensions in healthcare couldn’t have come at a better time. With international relevance, the book’s arguments help fuel a shift away from a ‘delivery’ model towards a more deliberative model of healthcare.
This timely book is the most comprehensive account yet of recent commissioning practice in the English NHS and its impact on health services and the healthcare system.
Drawing on eight years of research, expert researchers in the field analyse crucial aspects of commissioning, including competition and cooperation, the development of Clinical Commissioning Groups and contractual mechanisms. They also consider the influence of recent commissioning reforms on public health infrastructure.
For academics and policy makers in health services research and policy, this is a valuable collection of evidence that deepens understanding of how commissioning works.
This book contends that attempts to reform the NHS can only be understood by reference to both the wider social and political context, and to the organisational and ideational legacies present within the NHS itself. It aims to take students beyond a basic understanding of the historical development of health policy in the UK, to one that demonstrates an appreciation of the interactions between health policy, organisation and society.
Continuity and change in the NHS:
· acts as a crucial bridge between conventional textbooks on the NHS and contemporary health policy research;
· provides a theoretically rigorous but accessible account of the development of policy and organisational change not found elsewhere;
· presents new scholarship in the political economy of welfare in a clear format.
The book is aimed at third year and post-graduate students of politics, public management and health studies. It provides a theoretically inspired account of the development of health policy and organisation in the UK which will also be of interest to academics and researchers in the field.
THREE Healthcare: evidence to the fore Huw Davies and Sandra Nutley Introduction Physicians and other health workers have always claimed special knowledge about what works – from this springs their legitimacy. Those outside the health professions have harboured more cynical thoughts. Benjamin Franklin said that “God heals, and the doctor takes the fees” (Tripp, 1973), and George Bernard Shaw castigated the medical profession for being “no more scientific than their tailors” (Shaw, 1911). However, until recent years healthcare has been characterised not by
Introduction The way in which health systems are funded is often based on a series of political decisions which were made in the early development of different nations’ health systems, and yet, through processes of institutional reproduction, have remained remarkably intact today ( Immergut, 1992b ; Wilsford, 1995 ). As health systems absorb such substantial levels of resources, and because access to healthcare is not only recognised as a human right, but is also an international business of enormous scale, methods of healthcare funding in a particular
Policy & Politics vol 31 no 1 185 © The Policy Press, 2003 • ISSN 0305 5736 Analysing process in healthcare: the methodological and theoretical challenges Michael Calnan and Ewan Ferlie English There has been a growing demand for analysis of healthcare process as it has become increasingly recognised that patients, professionals and managers tend to value aspects of process as much as healthcare outcomes. The articles in this special section of Policy & Politics aim to consider the methodological and theoretical challenges involved in exploring the questions
Policy & Politics vol 31 no 1 195 © The Policy Press, 2003 • ISSN 0305 5736 Key words: healthcare • process research • organisational change • qualitative methods Policy & Politics vol 31 no 2 195–206 Process research in healthcare: towards three-dimensional learning Ann Langley, Jean-Louis Denis and Lise Lamothe English This article argues that process research provides a way of adding depth and perspective to our understanding of organisational change in healthcare and in other fields. We present a three- dimensional model of the research process and argue
