"Health regulation is an area of English public policy that involves a plethora of different bodies operating independently of one another with the purported aim of monitoring standards, ensuring minimum standards are met and providing assurance for the public and government."

Int J Health Plann Manage. 2013 Nov 27. doi: 10.1002/hpm.2231. [Epub ahead of print]

NHS arm's length bodies and regulatory networks in England: quantitative analysis.

McManus R.

Source

Keele University, Staffordshire, UK.

Abstract

Health regulation is an area of English public policy that involves a plethora of different bodies operating independently of one another with the purported aim of monitoring standards, ensuring minimum standards are met and providing assurance for the public and government. The purpose of this research is to ascertain as well as possible whether regulation generally is having a positive effect on service provision as well as what the relationship between the data collected by these bodies is. The rationale for testing whether the effect of regulation is positive is obvious; it costs money, time and effort, so does it work? The rationale for testing the relationships is that providers who score well on quality measures should also be experiencing fewer deaths compared with what would be expected. They should also be the providers who are performing well in terms of finances and governance. If there is no relationship between these data sets, then surely something is going wrong; that is, does the various regulatory monitoring and scrutiny actually measure what it sets out to measure?