Research Institute for Social Sciences

Lee has worked in NHS Finance since 1993.  He has worked in the NHS in Devon, Hampshire, Surrey and London. His current role covers Finance, IM&T, Procurement and Estates.  Prior to coming to Derby, in February 2008, he was Deputy Director of Finance at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

Lee is an Executive Committee Member of the Healthcare Financial Management Association in the East Midlands.  He also sits as an employer representative on the Regional Advisory Committee on Clinical Excellence Awards.  He is also currently pursuing a Professional Doctorate at Keele University in their Public Policy and Management faculty.

Bad Policy, Largely Ignored?: The development of the English NHS market for hospital care: A study into hospital funding, practitioner views and practitioner influence on the development of health policy

This thesis will appraise the current functioning of the English NHS market for hospital services.  It will review the current literature on the NHS market and the current status of the policies, which is a salient given some English NHS hospitals are entering a failure regime.  It will review the academic underpinning of the policy by reviewing the school of New Public Management, later synthesised through “Working for Patients” and then “Commissioning a Patient Led NHS”, through to the current 2012 Health and Social Care Act.

The research will review the current approach to funding for English NHS hospitals and review the exogenous factors which could be driving hospital financial performance using regression analysis on hospital surplus/deficits for 2011/12 against a series of selected independent funding variables for each of those English NHS hospitals.  This analysis will be made possible by the insider understanding of the author and his access to additional data from both the Department of Health and Monitor. 

The next area for review is practitioner views on the quasi-market policy.  The research will seek to ascertain the level of policy understanding, perceived adoption and approval of the policy.  Questionnaire based research with a multi-professional sample of NHS practitioners will be used.  The thesis will then review, based on public policy implementation literature, whether the views of practitioners could be influencing the success of policy implementation.

Further to these first two research aims, the research will then move onto addressing the nature of the use of evidence for public policy determination and implementation, via a series of semi-structured interviews with senior NHS policy and management practitioners.  This element of the research also seeks to explore the current policy consensus around hospital and NHS system management, and the competing policy strands of markets, targets and collegiate participation in the NHS system.