The Policy and Politics of Healthcare Corporatisation

This article is a research report that examines the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on healthcare corporatisation in the English NHS. It aims to analyze how the crisis influenced the dynamics of corporatisation and its implications for the New Politics of the Welfare State (NPWS) theories. The authors utilized administrative data from the English NHS spanning from 1995 to 2019 to create a multi-dimensional index of corporatisation, which was then used to assess the longitudinal effects of the financial crisis on the balance between management responsibilization and re-commodification practices. The findings indicate that while the re-commodification of NHS providers experienced a slowdown, the responsibilization of NHS managers continued to progress. The report concludes that the trajectory of NHS corporatisation was altered by the fiscal austerity measures implemented in response to the financial crisis, corroborating some aspects of NPWS theory while suggesting the need for further elaboration on systemic retrenchment in health systems.