Practitioners within the criminal justice system have been cautious about claiming that their work with offenders directly impacts on the level of subsequent re-offending. This article provides an overview of the generation and use of evidence on effectiveness within the criminal justice system,...

Health care practitioners (especially doctors) have always given assurances that what they do is efficacious. But in the past 50 years justification of the effectiveness of health care interventions has attained a new prominence. Evidence, at least notionally, now lies at the heart of health...

The United Kingdom has in many respects the archetypal centrally planned, publicly financed health care system in the form of National Health Service (NHS), established in 1948 in a time of great austerity after Second World War. It is largely funded from general taxation, and provides wide...

Healthcare professionals are increasingly held accountable for the standards of care that they provide. The focus of control for this accountability can be either internal or external activity to the professional body and can use implicit or explicit quality assessment techniques. The science of...

Professional boundaries make inter-professional communication, collaboration and teamwork more challenging and can jeopardise the provision of safe, high quality patient care. This in-depth interview study conducted in three UK acute hospital organisations in 2003–2004 explored how...

Purpose – The aim of the paper is to trace the history and development of performance measurement and management systems in the Italian National Health System (INHS), to identify their key characteristics, and to provide a critical assessment of their implementation....

Purpose – This paper aims to analyze the development of “pay‐for‐performance” (P4P) programs implemented by Israel's two largest sick funds, insuring 78 percent of the population. Design/methodology/approach – Analysis of the main features and their evolution over time, the observed...

Purpose – This paper aims to describe the introduction of pay‐for‐performance in New Zealand primary health care; compare this policy development with analogous English initiatives; discuss the risk of unintended, adverse consequences of the New Zealand programme; and consider key lessons...

Purpose – The authors' aim was to investigate mechanisms and perceptions of control following the implementation of a new “pay‐for‐performance” contract (the new General Medical Services, or GMS, contract) in general practice. Design/methodology/approach – This article was based on...