Can central government manage the national health service?

Abstract

The Government have devoted a lot of energy to improving the quality of management in the Civil Service. Most of this effort has gone on internal management, leaving relatively untouched the management of Departmental and broader government programmes and of outside organisations such as the national health service ‐ with all its regions, districts, family practitioner committees, and medical practitioners. One reason for this imbalance may be that, as successive National Audit Office reports have shown, management in the broader sense is actually rather difficult.