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Reconvergence Of The Private Sector: A Case Study

Decent Essays

The last main policy area noted by David Moon is the rejection of the private sector and thus heavy use of the public sector. This is the main issue in where England and Wales have severely diverged when it comes to health policy. As argued by Peter Vincent-Jones and David Hughes, this is because we have seen both countries diverge away from the norm. Wales has moved towards a public provision model whilst England has moved towards a hybrid of private and public. Vincent-Jones and Hughes point to both as diverging but point towards England as the culprit who has diverged from the social norm of the NHS, a public-funded health service, implying that if it was the other way around England may have stopped the radical agenda. This shows a key …show more content…

This reconvergence has been due to main distinct reasons, the initial shift for England to waiting list targets came due to external pressure from the media due to a focus on this issue during the General Elections of 2001 and 2005. Despite initial diverging from these types of targets, Wales has since implemented these targets, due to experiencing several critical reports criticising the performance of the Welsh NHS. This implementation is shown in the aftermath of the 2005 General Election after UK Labour promised no one would wait 18 weeks from GP referral to treatment. Due to this external pressure, Welsh Labour promised the same, but with a time frame of 26 weeks. This framing of the issue in the media, which prioritised waiting lists times led to the Welsh health policy being compared unfavourably to the English model which had adamantly pursued these targets openly. The unfair nature of being compared on an issue which has been placed on less importance highlights a key problem within the NHS. The problem being that despite divergences from all UK administrations, the UK government is held as the standard-bearer and the ‘norm’ from which all devolved administrations should emulate. This reconvergence around the waiting list targets in England seems to outline that in areas in which a particular interest has been drawn by the British media, as a collective, there has been a convergence with the English

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