Examines the strategic planning process as well as some practical issues associated with strategic planning. Specific emphasis is placed on a simplified approach to strategic planning. The relationship between strategic planning and performance is discussed. A brief overview of common approaches...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an explanation and understanding of developments in casemix and related information systems at a large regional hospital, Health Waikato (HW), in the centre of the North Island of New Zealand. The themes will be explicated and theorised, drawing on the...

The Resource Management Initiative (RMI) is a central ingredient in plans to instil market‐based relationships in health care and medicine. However, these plans have not benefited from any adequate assessment of “resource management”. Demonstrates how earlier experience with resource...

Aims to promote concern and debate about the penetration of accounting and financial management in the health care sectors of several Anglo‐Saxon countries – the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand. Questions may be raised in several ways. For example, by highlighting how...

Since the mid‐1980s the major players in US health care have argued that costs and benefits should underlie the allocation of health care resources. Looks at 30 cost benefit studies taken from the medical literature and examines five of them in depth, using the “depth hermeneutical”...

Discussion of health care costs has expanded beyond the technical domains of accountancy and entered the realms of public discourse. Analyses this discourse through an examination of all the stories published in The New York Times between 1 April 1992 and 1 May 1993 which contained the phrase...

Examines the move towards a commercialized, economically driven, health sector in New Zealand. Reforms involve extensive organizational rearrangements and the creation of profit‐driven businesses in place of public hospitals. These institutional rearrangements involve the fabrication of new...

General Medical Practitioners (GPs) and their practices have been subject to a wide range of mandatory financial and administrative changes in the last few years. Explores the nature of these changes as well as providing insights into the way these demands have been managed, drawing its...

Fundholding (the opportunity to hold a budget at practice level) has given general practitioners (GPs) purchasing power for medical services within the reformed UK National Health Service (NHS). This new purchasing power equates to financial leverage with the NHS consultants in hospitals. Argues...

During the last decade, several financial initiatives aimed at “reforming” the public sector in the UK have been produced by the Government. These initiatives seek to supplant historically established bureaucratic modes of governance, underpinned by a public service ethic, by market‐based...