The Role of Cultural Performance in Health Care Commissioning

Abstract

New Labour acceded power in 1997 much influenced by a ‘third way’ ideology (Giddens, 1998) and promised an approach which lay between the ‘Old Labour command and control’ and the internal market approach of the Conservatives (Ham, 2004). Central to their vision was a commitment to public services, but services which were much modernized and delivered in different ways from the past. This government’s ten-year reform plan for the National Health Service (NHS) was set out in The NHS Plan (Secretary of State for Health, 2000) which promised unprecedented amounts of investment in health services, but in return for a radical overhaul of the system. Since the publication of this document much effort — and investment — have been expended in England in an attempt to change a health service that was ‘failing to deliver’ into one driven by cycles of ‘continuous improvement’. Leatherman and Sutherland (2004: 288–9) describe these improvement efforts as being the ‘most ambitious, comprehensive, systematic and intentionally funded effort to create predictable and sustainable capacity for improving quality of a nation’s health care system’.