Health and healthcare

Health care systems around the world face the challenge of trying to continuously improve care quality. Market reforms, encouraging competition between providers such as hospitals, have been promoted as one way of achieving this. The Health and Social Care Bill, published in January 2011, sets out a comprehensive system for …

The Health and Social Care Bill sets out how groups of General Practitioners (GPs), known as commissioning consortia, will be given real budgets to commission care on behalf of patients in their local communities.1 Commissioning has been described as ‘the process of assessing the health needs of a population, then …