Quality Management and Managerialism in Healthcare:: A Critical Historical Survey

Quality Management and Managerialism in Healthcare creates a comprehensive and systematic international survey of various perspectives on healthcare quality management together with some of their most pertinent critiques. Chapter one starts with a general discussion of the factors that drove the introduction of management paradigms into public sector and health management contexts in the mid to late 1980s. Chapter two explores the rise of risk awareness in medicine; which, prior to the 1980s, stood largely in isolation to the implementation of managerial performance targets. Chapter three investigates the widespread adoption of performance management and clinical governance frameworks during the 1980s and 1990s. This is followed by Chapters four and five which examine systems based models of patient safety and the evidence-based medicine movement as exemplars of managerial perspectives on healthcare quality. Chapter six discusses potential future avenues for the development of alternative perspectives on quality of care which emphasise workforce involvement. The book concludes by reviewing the factors which have underpinned the managerialist trajectory of healthcare management over the past decades and explores the potential impact of nascent technologies such as 'connected health' and 'telehealth' on future developments.