Governance systems which are based on assumptions of purposive-rational action have received significant criticism. For example the quality and performance frameworks of the English NHS function on the basis of incentives and sanctions, and have been critiqued in terms of both the logic on which...

There has much debate about the extent to which professional discretion has been challenged by recent organisational changes such as through the new forms of governance associated with the introduction of the principles of the New Public Management (NPM) into health systems and other public...

This study informs ‘evidence-based’ implementation by using an innovative methodology to provide further understanding of the implementation process in the English NHS using two distinctly different NICE clinical guidelines as exemplars.

This paper examines the factors beyond NHS dentists' remuneration which may explain the variations in the public|private mix in general dental practitioners' workload in the UK. Given that NHS dentistry is subject to a fixed price system, the study focused mainly on non-income supply-side...

Extravagant claims have been made about the power of the Health Belief Model (HBM) to explain both decisions to adopt patterns of health behaviour and to use preventive health services. However, studies where information on beliefs are collected before information on behaviour are not common....

Recent criticisms of the thesis of medicalisation focusing at the level of doctor-patient interaction have suggested that patient dependency on or addiction to modern scientific medicine and in particular medical scientific technology is overstated. However, empirical research to examine this is...

One possible explanation for the positive relationship between age and public and user views of health care is that it reflects a generational effect and this relationship has changed over the last decade or so. The analysis carried out in this report examines the relationship between ageing and...

A hypothetical model was proposed for explaining the relationship between general practitioners' system of payment and the amount of time spent in patient and non-patient work. It was hypothesized that GPs reactions to higher workload vary according to the payment system. In this paper we...

This paper develops an analysis of women's perceptions of medical technology and the elements which shape them, and then draws out the implications for medicine and the medicalization thesis. In the first part of the paper we outline the macro-theoretical debates about medicalization and the...