Doctors and managers: Commission for Health Improvement gives its perspective

What is the Commission for Health Improvement?

Doctors and managers

Editor—Doctors and managers obviously need to work together. To have two powerful groups not working together is likely to frustrate the efforts of both and to damage the service offered to patients. Why then is the relationship between doctors and managers often strained and currently perceived to be at a low ebb? Why is it that two groups, both protesting a desire to put patients at the centr...

Doctors, managers and politicians.

Doctors and politicians have rarely seen eye to eye on what a health service should provide and how it should be managed. The introduction of general management in 1984, while initially successful, created new fault-lines between doctors, managers and politicians that were compounded by a succession of NHS reorganisations. These changes brought politics too close to front-line management, highl...

Improvement through inspection? The development of the new Commission for Health Improvement in England and Wales.

Introduction Inspection and external review are increasingly used in healthcare systems throughout the world, in various forms, in pursuit of quality assurance and improvement. Although the experience of systems such as accreditation in those countries which have used them for decades is decidedly mixed, we are nevertheless witnessing what has been described as an explosion in external audit, r...

Doctors and managers: building a new relationship.

There is a long history of problems in the relationship between doctors and managers. The reasons for this stem from the values of each group and the effect that these have on their views on a number of key aspects of healthcare and its delivery. Managers have been seen as the malign embodiment of changes in society and the instrument of the wishes of governments, which are often viewed with su...