Content area
Full text
Reform of Healthcare
Edited by Helen Dickinson, Ross Millar and Michael West
Introduction
The National Health Service (NHS) is the largest employer in the UK, and since the late 1990s has gone through a period of unprecedented change in a wide range of areas. Reforms such as the NHS Plan ([13] Department of Health, 2000) have sought to help the NHS meet the needs of patients and improve health outcomes, whilst the establishment of NHS Foundation Trusts in 2004 gave financial freedoms and independent regulation to secondary providers of care. Recent developments have focused on improving quality ([15] Department of Health, 2009), with a drive for NHS organisations to become more cost effective through promoting innovation and improvement. This paper provides insight into this agenda through the introduction of innovation as part of a management development programme at a Primary Care Trust (PCT), a type of primary care organisation in the UK.
The management development programme was designed by a university business school (University A) in partnership with a PCT (Northern PCT) and was aimed at junior and middle managers, addressing the core skills required from the PCT, and allowing managers to gain credits towards a business-related degree. A few months into the programme, the PCT requested that innovation be introduced into the programme as a way of developing ideas of saving money, instilling a new way of thinking amongst staff and implementing a new policy from the Department of Health ([26] Maher, 2008). The paper tells the story of implementing policy into practice and begins with the policy context, an examination of the literature on innovation and improvement and an account of the management development programme. This is followed by an outline of the methodology used, findings and a discussion. The conclusion highlights the study's key contributions, and identifies some of the implications for future policy in the practice and reform of healthcare.
Policy context
The National Health Service was established in 1948 and has grown to become the world's largest publicly funded health service, born out of a long-held ideal that excellent health care should be available to all regardless of wealth. Since its establishment, the NHS has gone through a number of structural changes, which has meant that the way services are...