The death of the English National Health Service (NHS) has been pronounced many times over the years, but the time and cause of death and the murder weapon remains to be fully established. This article reviews some of these claims, and asks for clearer criteria and evidence to be presented.

BACKGROUND According to the provisions of the Health Act 2006, NHS acute Trusts had to become smoke-free by July 2007. Mental health Trusts were granted a further year before all indoor smoking areas have to be removed. This study was carried out to determine the extent of smoke-free policy implementation in English NHS acute and mental health Trusts, and to explore challenges and impacts relat...

Process-driven performance targets were used in the English NHS in the late 1990s and early 2000’s to drive improvement. There have been clear successes, and well-documented instances of perverse incentives leading to negative behaviours, such as data manipulation and resource diversion. Recently, policy in England has moved away from targets, focusing more on locally-negotiated metrics. The li...

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BACKGROUND Over the past three decades, a limited range of market like mechanisms have been introduced into the hierarchically structured English National Health Service ('NHS'), which is a nationally tax funded, budget limited healthcare system, with access to care for all, producing structures known as a quasi market. Recently, the Health and Social Care Act 2012 ('HSCA') has been enacted, in...

Martin Powell suggests that the death of the English National Health Service (NHS) has been announced so many times we are at risk of not noticing should it actually happen. He is right. If we 'cry wolf' too many times, we risk losing sight of what is important about the NHS and why.

This article considers how the 'accidental logics' of political settlements for the English National Health Service (NHS) and the Medicare and Medicaid programmes in the United States have resulted in different institutional arrangements and different implicit social contracts for rationing, which we define to be the denial of health care that is beneficial but is deemed to be too costly. This ...