IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/hecopl/v1y2006i04p343-370_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Structure and logic of regulation and governance of quality of health care: was OFSTED a model for the Commission for Health Improvement?

Author

Listed:
  • BEVAN, GWYN
  • CORNWELL, JOCELYN

Abstract

The Labour Government elected in 1997 faced similar problems in health care to those faced by the Conservative Government in schools in the early 1990s. And the policies developed for health care in the late 1990s echoed those that had been implemented for schools. This paper considers one of those common policies, namely the creation of new central inspectorates required to visit all organizations over a four-year period: the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) to inspect the quality of teaching in schools, and the Commission for Health Improvement (CHI) to review the implementation of the systems and processes of clinical governance in every organization in the National Health Service (NHS). At its creation, CHI was described as an OFSTED for the NHS. This paper compares these two inspectorates; describes origins of policies and institutions; considers their rhetoric and practices; describes the processes the two organizations used and considers their impacts. It argues that structural differences meant that CHI could never have been an OFSTED for the NHS; relational distance is a key aspect of inspection/regulation; and that the key to effective regulation in the case of the NHS was the relational proximity between CHI and the NHS, with the added weight of a strong performance management regime.

Suggested Citation

  • Bevan, Gwyn & Cornwell, Jocelyn, 2006. "Structure and logic of regulation and governance of quality of health care: was OFSTED a model for the Commission for Health Improvement?," Health Economics, Policy and Law, Cambridge University Press, vol. 1(4), pages 343-370, October.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:hecopl:v:1:y:2006:i:04:p:343-370_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1744133106005020/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Matthew Skellern, 2017. "The hospital as a multi-product firm: the effect of hospital competition on value-added indicators of clinical quality," CEP Discussion Papers dp1484, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    2. Juliette Malley & José‐Luis Fernández, 2010. "Measuring Quality In Social Care Services: Theory And Practice," Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 81(4), pages 559-582, December.
    3. Gwyn Bevan & Richard Hamblin, 2009. "Hitting and missing targets by ambulance services for emergency calls: effects of different systems of performance measurement within the UK," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 172(1), pages 161-190, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:hecopl:v:1:y:2006:i:04:p:343-370_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/hep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.