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This is a popular issue to talk about, so here’s a detailed recent article in a Health Policy journal

Highlights

• England’s NHS is being privatised as services are outsourced to private providers.
• But why privatisation happens, and whether it prioritises ‘quality’ is unknown.
• This study interviews healthcare commissioners and asks why services are outsourced.
• Commissioners are responding to unmet need, national guidelines, financial pressures and politics.
• Some instances of privatisation fail to prioritise quality in the outsourcing process.

Conclusion: HS in England is seeing increased levels of privatisation as private providers deliver more treatments year on year. The reasons for this phenomenon in the short-term can often be linked to a deteriorating ability, during an extended period of underfunding, for NHS providers to meet the demands required by the population. In the longer term, marketisation reforms have created a service in which private providers are sometimes not restrained from the NHS and enabled to force the further increases in privatisation.