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Is the end in sight? A study of how and why services are decommissioned in the English National Health Service
Author(s) -
Williams Iestyn,
Harlock Jenny,
Robert Glenn,
Kimberly John,
Mannion Russell
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
sociology of health and illness
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 97
eISSN - 1467-9566
pISSN - 0141-9889
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9566.13234
Subject(s) - nuclear decommissioning , typology , politics , public relations , vulnerability (computing) , public administration , sociology , political science , engineering , computer science , computer security , anthropology , law , waste management
The decommissioning of a health‐care service is invariably a highly complex and contentious process which faces many implementation challenges. There has been little specific theorisation of this phenomena, although insights can be transferred from wider literatures on policy implementation and change processes. In this paper, we present findings from empirical case studies of three decommissioning processes initiated in the English National Health Service. We apply Levine's (1979, Public Administration Review, 39(2), 179–183) typology of decommissioning drivers and insights from the empirical literature on pluralistic health‐care contexts, complex change processes and institutional constraints. Data include interviews, non‐participant observation and documents analysis. Alongside familiar patterns of pluralism and political partisanship, our results suggest the important role played by institutional factors in determining the outcome of decommissioning processes and in particular the prior requirement of political vulnerability for services to be successfully closed. Factors linked to the extent of such vulnerability include the scale of the proposed changes and extent to which they are supported at the macrolevel.