Professional Power and the Need for Health Care Book

This book is a critical ethnography of deciscion making with respect to the assessment of health care need in the UK health systems. Theories of need, justice and rights are reviewed in relation to the structural changes that have occured to the National Health Service in recent years. To illustrate the arguments, a case study of planning services for kidney failure patients in London is used. The descisions of a group of professionals involved in an independent review of government services evaluates critically using particular theories of need and communicative action. The relationship between needs, as understood and defined by medical and mangerial groups, and markets form the focus for a more general critique of the reformed UK health system.