Main description:

The National Health Service, or NHS, is the United Kingdom's national healthcare system. It oversees the public's health and ensures the medical wellbeing of the population of the UK. Governance network processes are complex because of the different nature of agendas and strategies of actors involved in health, but increasingly, because of the link between social and healthcare delivery, recent initiatives to provide a joined up or integrated approach have been presented. However, the extent of joined-up governance processes in the National Health Service is rather uneven. So far, reforms to try to improve the running of the NHS through the introduction of market mechanisms or increased decentralization have only served to exacerbate such tensions and resulted in further fragmentation of the public health system.

The NHS and Contemporary Health Challenges From a Multilevel Perspective illustrates the complexities of governing public health services that are part of the NHS and takes an innovative approach by examining public health provision through a multiscalar lens, which reveals significant limits of the current governance model. The book raises the various challenges that clinical staff, public authorities, and the general public face in the provision of healthcare to uphold core values inherent in health systems. While highlighting topics including health governance, patient satisfaction, and public health, this book is ideally designed for policymakers, government officials, healthcare administrators, hospital managers, healthcare researchers, medical professionals, and students.