In UK government, commissioners perform the vital task of ensuring that health and social care services meet the needs of the people who use them. Essential for everyone involved in the planning and delivery of these services, this book comprehensively explores what commissioning is, its past, and its future. A wide range of leading contributors from fields including health care, social care, and local government takes readers through the key stages of the commissioning cycle and addresses such interrelated themes as the economics of commissioning, user involvement, and commissioning in an era of personalization.

This popular book is written by leading experts in the field and covers all the key aspects of healthcare management. Written with healthcare managers, professionals and students in mind, it provides an accessible and evidence-based guide to healthcare systems, services, organizations and management. Key areas covered include: • Structure and delivery of healthcare services in the international context, including mental health, acute care, primary care, chronic disease and integrated care • Allocating resources for healthcare: setting and managing priorities • Health technologies, research and innovation • Global health policy: governing health systems across borders • Patient and public involvement in healthcare • Healthcare governance and performance This third edition has been significantly rewritten, with 10 new contributors and a new chapter structure designed to better support learning, practical application and further study. In addition, there is a more international focus and each chapter includes new case studies giving global examples of health systems and services, new and updated learning activities to encourage application to your own organization, and a range of links to useful online resources. Healthcare Management is essential research-based reading for students, teachers and healthcare professionals involved in management, research and health policy making. “Walshe and Smith have assembled an invaluable introduction to healthcare management and health systems. With their fellow authors, they provide a comprehensive review of a range of issues related to the funding and provision of care, and how services are organised and managed. Now in its third edition, Healthcare Management has been updated and revised to meet the needs of teachers and students alike.” Professor Chris Ham, Chief Executive, The King’s Fund, UK "This book covers the main areas of knowledge which managers need, and gives tools for thinking and empirical examples relevant to current challenges. Evidence based management might not always be possible, but this book gives a way for a manager to become research-informed and therefore more effective. This third edition of the book is even more relevant internationally and improved to help readers apply the ideas to their situation.” Professor John Øvretveit, Director of Research, LIME/MMC, The Karolinska Institute, Sweden “No-one learns to be a manager in a classroom or from a book, but books that take this disclaimer as their starting point are indispensable. Walshe and Smith (and their fellow authors) invite their audience (healthcare managers, healthcare policy makers and postgraduate students, taking courses in healthcare management) to critically combine experiential learning with academic learning and to acquire knowledge from both practice and theory. By doing so, they have found the third way between the advocates of evidence-based management and their criticasters.” Dr. Jan-Kees Helderman, Associate Professor in Public Administration, Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands

A clearly written and well structured textbook, providing an introduction to decision making and priority setting, this title brings together theories, practice and evidence from a wide range of disciplines.

Representing the first collection on the topic, this book builds from foundations to case studies, to future prospects, providing the reader with a rich and comprehensive understanding of the use of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in healthcare. The first section of the collection presents the foundations of MCDA as it is applied to healthcare decisions, providing guidance on the ethical and theoretical underpinnings of MCDA and how to select MCDA methods appropriate to different decision settings. Section two comprises a collection of case studies spanning the decision continuum, including portfolio development, benefit–risk assessment, health technology assessment, priority setting, resource optimisation, clinical practice and shared decision making. Section three explores future directions in the application of MCDA to healthcare and identifies opportunities for further research to support these.

This pathbreaking book investigates welfare state change in the area of health care- a field widely neglected by comparative welfare state research. While some work on health care expenditure exists, health care rights have not been systematically studied since social rights have exclusively focused on entitlement to cash benefits. Addressing this research gap, Böhm analyses in what way the social right to health care has been modified in the course of general welfare state transformation since the late 1970s. Taking England and Germany as examples, she assesses how health care reforms conducted under the conditions of constrained budgets, demographic ageing, and rapid medical progress, have altered access to and generosity of public health care systems over the past 35 years. The book’s findings significantly increase our understanding of social rights and reveals fundamental differences of approach: while Germany provides absolute and enforceable rights to health care for each (entitled) individual, English social health care rights are directed towards the population as a whole and contingent upon the availability of resources, i.e. they are not absolute and not enforceable. This distinction between individual and collective social rights will be an important contribution to the theory of social rights given its applicability to other types of social rights and its usefulness in tracing changes in social rights over time.