Abstract

KIE: A British professor of social policy discusses the implications for British medicine of the Thatcher government's increasing involvement in the activities of the National Health Service. In response to economic and consumer pressures, the government has changed its policy emphasis from the control of health care spending in total to control over the use of resources by service providers. Klein notes some of the milestones in the process of policy change, and predicts a period of intellectual and political turmoil while the government and the medical profession negotiate how physicians will be held accountable for their use of public resources.