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Quality and Regulation in Health Care: International Experiences
Throughout the Western world, health care systems, both public and private, are grappling with the problem of assuring quality while containing costs. On the one hand, governments and insurers argue that there must be some limit to the apparently endless growth of health care expenditures. On the other, patient groups and consumer advocates, already dissatisfied by the problems in holding doctors accountable for their actions, protest that such limits must not result in sick people getting inferior treatments.
The two movements find common cause in the development of systems of regulation intended to police the quality of care. Some of these are initiated by individuals, like the tort system of litigation over particular acts of negligence or the work of licensing boards reacting to complaints about a physician's fitness to practise. Others are corporate, as in the spread of medical audit or the introduction of schemes of management control. Such regulatory systems, it is believed, can combine the prevention of ineffective, dangerous or inefficient medical practices with the promotion of high standards of care and sensitivity to consumer demands or expectations.
Based on papers presented at annual meetings of the US Law and Society Association, Quality and Regulation in Health Care employs socio-legal ideas concerning regulation to examine the methods used to influence the quality of health care in the US, UK and Western Europe and examines in detail the debate surrounding the How can the professional expertise of the clinicians be reconciled with the preferences of their patients and the economic concerns of taxpayers or insurers?
The two movements find common cause in the development of systems of regulation intended to police the quality of care. Some of these are initiated by individuals, like the tort system of litigation over particular acts of negligence or the work of licensing boards reacting to complaints about a physician's fitness to practise. Others are corporate, as in the spread of medical audit or the introduction of schemes of management control. Such regulatory systems, it is believed, can combine the prevention of ineffective, dangerous or inefficient medical practices with the promotion of high standards of care and sensitivity to consumer demands or expectations.
Based on papers presented at annual meetings of the US Law and Society Association, Quality and Regulation in Health Care employs socio-legal ideas concerning regulation to examine the methods used to influence the quality of health care in the US, UK and Western Europe and examines in detail the debate surrounding the How can the professional expertise of the clinicians be reconciled with the preferences of their patients and the economic concerns of taxpayers or insurers?
157 pages, Hardcover
Published September 16, 1992
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