IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v73y2011i4p522-529.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Innovation and the English National Health Service: A qualitative study of the independent sector treatment centre programme

Author

Listed:
  • Turner, Simon
  • Allen, Pauline
  • Bartlett, Will
  • Pérotin, Virginie

Abstract

Over the past two decades, an international trend of exposing public health services to different forms of economic organisation has emerged. In the English National Health Service (NHS), care is currently provided through a quasi-market including 'diverse' providers from the private and third sector. The predominant scheme through which private sector companies have been awarded NHS contracts is the Independent Sector Treatment Centre (ISTC) programme. ISTCs were designed to produce innovative models of service delivery for elective care and stimulate innovation among incumbent NHS providers. This paper investigates these claims using qualitative data on the impact of an ISTC upon a local health economy (LHE) composed of NHS organisations in England. Using the case of elective orthopaedic surgery, we conducted semi-structured interviews with senior managers from incumbent NHS providers and an ISTC in 2009. We show that ISTCs exhibit a different relationship with frontline clinicians because they counteract the power of professional communities associated with the NHS. This has positive and negative consequences for innovation. ISTCs have introduced new routines unencumbered by the extant norms of professional communities, but they appear to represent weaker learning environments and do not reproduce cooperation across organisational boundaries to the same extent as incumbent NHS providers.

Suggested Citation

  • Turner, Simon & Allen, Pauline & Bartlett, Will & Pérotin, Virginie, 2011. "Innovation and the English National Health Service: A qualitative study of the independent sector treatment centre programme," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 73(4), pages 522-529, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:73:y:2011:i:4:p:522-529
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953611003613
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Oliver, Adam, 2007. "Inconsistent objectives – reflections on some selective health care policy developments in Europe," Health Economics, Policy and Law, Cambridge University Press, vol. 2(1), pages 93-106, January.
    2. Amin, Ash & Roberts, Joanne, 2008. "Knowing in action: Beyond communities of practice," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 353-369, March.
    3. Allen, Pauline & Croxson, Bronwyn & Roberts, Jennifer A. & Archibald, Kate & Crawshaw, Shirley & Taylor, Lynda, 2002. "The use of contracts in the management of infectious disease related risk in the NHS internal market," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 59(3), pages 257-281, March.
    4. Turner, S. & Lourenço, A., 2010. "Competition and Public Service Broadcasting: Stimulating Creativity or servicing Capital?," Working Papers wp408, Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge.
    5. Joanne Roberts, 2006. "Limits to Communities of Practice," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(3), pages 623-639, May.
    6. Sheaff, Rod & Benson, Lawrence & Farbus, Lou & Schofield, Jill & Mannion, Russell & Reeves, David, 2010. "Network resilience in the face of health system reform," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 70(5), pages 779-786, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Waring, Justin & Bishop, Simon, 2013. "McDonaldization or Commercial Re-stratification: Corporatization and the multimodal organisation of English doctors," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 147-155.
    2. OHE Commission, 2012. "Report of the Office of Health Economics Commission on Competition in the NHS," Monographs, Office of Health Economics, number 000168.
    3. Calogero Guccio & Marco Martorana & Isidoro Mazza & Ilde Rizzo, 2021. "Back to the Future: Does the use of information and communication technology enhance the performance of public historical archives?," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer;The Association for Cultural Economics International, vol. 45(1), pages 13-43, March.
    4. Krachler, Nick & Greer, Ian, 2015. "When does marketisation lead to privatisation? Profit-making in English health services after the 2012 Health and Social Care Act," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 215-223.
    5. Alvaro S Almeida, 2016. "The Role Of Private Non-Profit Healthcare Organizations In Nhs Systems: Implications For The Portuguese Hospital Devolution Program," FEP Working Papers 577, Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Verena Brinks, 2016. "Situated affect and collective meaning: A community perspective on processes of value creation and commercialization in enthusiast-driven fields," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 48(6), pages 1152-1169, June.
    2. Simon Turner, 2013. "Absorptive Capacity: The Role of Communities of Practice," Working Papers wp444, Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge.
    3. Sandra Dubouloz & Anne Berthinier-Poncet & Luciana Castro Gonçalves & Emilie Ruiz & Catherine Thevenard-Puthod, 2021. "Innovation communities: from their characterization to the questioning of their boundaries [Comunidades de innovación: desde su caracterización hasta el cuestionamiento de sus fronteras]," Post-Print hal-02891869, HAL.
    4. Marijn A. van Weele & Henk J. Steinz & Frank J. van Rijnsoever, 2018. "Start‐up Communities as Communities of Practice: Shining a Light on Geographical Scale and Membership," Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG, vol. 109(2), pages 173-188, April.
    5. Ferguson, J.E. & Huysman, M.H., 2009. "Between ambition and approach: towards sustainable knowledge management in development organizations," Serie Research Memoranda 0003, VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Econometrics.
    6. Turner, S. & Lourenço, A., 2010. "Competition and Public Service Broadcasting: Stimulating Creativity or servicing Capital?," Working Papers wp408, Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge.
    7. Agterberg, M. & Hooff, B. van den & Huysman, M., 2008. "Keeping the wheels turning : multi-level dynamics in organizing networks of practice," Serie Research Memoranda 0003, VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Econometrics.
    8. Ivory, Chris & Casey, Rebecca & Watson, Kayleigh, 2016. "The role of mobile ICT in repair worker communities of practice," 27th European Regional ITS Conference, Cambridge (UK) 2016 148676, International Telecommunications Society (ITS).
    9. Ferguson, Julie & Huysman, Marleen & Soekijad, Maura, 2010. "Knowledge Management in Practice: Pitfalls and Potentials for Development," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 38(12), pages 1797-1810, December.
    10. Sandra Dubouloz & Anne Berthinier-Poncet & Luciana Castro Gonçalves & Emilie Ruiz & Catherine Thevenard-Puthod, 2020. "Communautés d'innovation : de leur caractérisation au questionnement de leurs frontières," Working Papers hal-02891869, HAL.
    11. Michael Kaethler, 2019. "Curating creative communities of practice: the role of ambiguity," Journal of Organization Design, Springer;Organizational Design Community, vol. 8(1), pages 1-17, December.
    12. Kuebart, Andreas & Ibert, Oliver, 2019. "Beyond territorial conceptions of entrepreneurial ecosystems: The dynamic spatiality of knowledge brokering in seed accelerators," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 63(2-4), pages 118-133.
    13. Emmanuelle Vaast & Geoff Walsham, 2009. "Trans-Situated Learning: Supporting a Network of Practice with an Information Infrastructure," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 20(4), pages 547-564, December.
    14. Daniel R. Terry & Hoang Nguyen & Blake Peck & Andrew Smith & Hoang Phan, 2020. "Communities of practice: A systematic review and meta‐synthesis of what it means and how it really works among nursing students and novices," Journal of Clinical Nursing, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 29(3-4), pages 370-380, February.
    15. Thierry Burger-Helmchen & Patrick Llerena, 2008. "A case study of a creative start-up: governance, communities and knowledge management," Journal of Innovation Economics, De Boeck Université, vol. 0(2), pages 125-146.
    16. Cristina Páez-Avilés & Esteve Juanola-Feliu & Islam Bogachan-Tahirbegi & Mónica Mir & Manel González-Piñero & Josep Samitier, 2015. "Innovation And Technology Transfer Of Medical Devices Fostered By Cross-Disciplinary Communities Of Practitioners," International Journal of Innovation Management (ijim), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 19(06), pages 1-27, December.
    17. Halvor Holtskog, 2017. "Defining the Characteristics of an Expert in a Social Context Through Subjective Evaluation," Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Springer;Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), vol. 8(3), pages 1014-1031, September.
    18. Fu-Sheng Tsai & Gayle Baugh & Shih-Chieh Fang & Julia Lin, 2014. "Contingent contingency: Knowledge heterogeneity and new product development performance revisited," Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Springer, vol. 31(1), pages 149-169, March.
    19. Hugues Jeannerat & Leila Kebir, 2012. "Mobility of Knowledge. Knowledge resources and markets: What territorial economic systems ?," GRET Publications and Working Papers 02-12, GRET Group of Research in Territorial Economy, University of Neuchâtel.
    20. Conrad Wiedeler & Nadine Kammerlander, 2021. "Learning the ropes of entrepreneurship: understanding internal corporate venturing for family firms from an entrepreneurial learning perspective," Review of Managerial Science, Springer, vol. 15(3), pages 669-703, April.

    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:eee:socmed:v:73:y:2011:i:4:p:522-529. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    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.