On 5 July this year the NHS will be 70. In all its 70 years it has rarely been far from the headlines. It has been through more than its fair share of reforms, crises and funding ups and downs. Over that period, the amount we spend on it has risen inexorably. Yet, today, concerns about the...

This paper examines the impacts of private hospital entry on publicly funded elective care in England. From 2006, private hospitals were encouraged to enter certain publicly funded markets to compete with existing public hospitals and stimulate quality improvements. Studying elective hip...

Against a backdrop of increasing demands for health care, the National Health Service (NHS) has long sought ways to increase the number of staff available to provide care to patients. More doctors, nurses, midwives and health-care assistants (HCAs) mean that the NHS can deliver more, and...

The 2020 NHS People Plan committed to providing flexible working opportunities to all NHS staff. An important component of flexible working is less-than-full-time (LTFT) working, enabling staff to balance paid work with other commitments. However, there is currently only limited empirical...

This paper examines the impact of in utero exposure to the Asian influenza pandemic of 1957 upon physical and cognitive development in childhood. Outcome data is provided by the National Child Development Study (NCDS), a panel study of a cohort of British children who were all potentially...

There is widespread and unexplained variation in the outcomes of similar patients across place and providers in all developed health systems. This paper provides new evidence on the role senior doctors play in determining patient outcomes. I exploit within-hospital quasi-random assignment of...

A common reform used to increase consumer choice and competition in public services has been to allow private providers to compete with public incumbents. However, there remains a concern that not all consumers are able to benefit equally from wider choice. We consider the case of publicly...