Critical Analysis of National Health Service (NHS) Public Management

Critical Analysis of National Health Service (NHS) Public Management
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CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF NHS PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
Introduction
Since the 1980s, the management and organization of the United Kingdom (U.K.) public sector has been adversely affected by the rise of the New Public Management (NPM). The change has been profound in transient and superficial management to achieve radical systems, structures as well as the underlying value systems. These trends are notable across other sub-sectors such as health and education. However, the rate and pace of change varies across these subsectors (Hyndman, N. & Lapsley, I., 385, 2016). The NPM model has emerged to succeed in the old Public Administration (P.A.) model. Arguably, there has been a paradigm shift to the NPM model, which has been contributed by the new political economies of the 1980s. One of the sub-sectors that NHS has changed is the National Health Service (NHS). The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of the NHS model in public management. Furthermore, the paper will look at its strengths and weaknesses based on general management theories and propose recommendations to make public administration better in the U.K.
Analysis of the Existing Public Management System U.K.
The New Public Management (NPM) is the system that the U.K. government uses to manage public resources such as the NHS. The system was brought to replace the traditional public administration through the introduction of new management techniques that are currently used in the public sectors. The traditional P.A. had led to the split between professionals and the political bureaucracy. Before the introduction of NPM, the nature of public services had become subject to economic and political debate (Hyndman, N. & Lapsley, I., 390, 2016). However, with the introduction of NRM, there was a new consensus which was accompanied by irreversible updates and changes in global politics. In the mid-1970s, the world witnessed the entry of neo-liberal and consensus.
Furthermore, the social-democratic consensus had implications of the nature of public service activity. This involved a need to create welfare states and Keynesian economies (Dent, M. &Barry, J., 2017, 6). The introduction of NPM was a reaction to Keynesianism, which was limited in responding to unemployment, low-growth, and high inflation.
However, NPM is a difficult concept to define because it has sets of ideas and techniques instead of a firm paradigm focus. Initially, NPM was not a concept for decades until Christopher Hood, who defined it extensively. According to Hood, NPM theory has three main ideas; marketization, disaggregation, and incentivization. Marketization is a concept that involves market competition in public services through the separation of the provider from the purchaser (Dent, M. et al., 2, 2017). This competition exists in quasi-markets such as health, education, and social housing sectors. Disaggregation involves the strengthening of social services through strict central control and frameworks. Incentivization, on the other hand, requires the provision of incentives to ensure performance efficiency in p...