NEW FORMS OF PROVIDER IN THE ENGLISH NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE

A wide ranging set of reforms is being introduced into the English National Health Service (NHS). They are designed to increase the market-like behaviour of providers of care with a view to improving efficiency, quality and responsiveness of services. This paper is concerned with one aspect of those reforms: namely the policy to increase the diversity of types of providers of care to NHS patients. In this context, increasing diversity means that providers will not all be standard publicly owned NHS organizations. They can be publicly owned but autonomous, or independent (both in for-profit and not for profit). The paper discusses the wide range of organizational forms available, analyzing their governance structures It then discusses the small amount of evidence currently available about the performance of diverse providers of health care. © 2011 The Authors Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics © 2011 CIRIEC.