From General Practice to Primary Care: The Industrialisation of Family Medicine in Britain

Abstract

Health services are multi-unit enterprises providing multi-component services, and organisationally are equivalent to very large, diversified companies. Although public health services like Britain's National Health service (NHS) are not for-profit enterprises, they may share characteristics of such enterprises, particularly where these characteristics offer methods of cost-containment. Since all health services, however organised, face the same problem of resources being insufficient to meet demand for health care, they exhibit an underlying tendency towards solving problems in health care using mechanisms borrowed from other industries. This paper attempts to answer the question: to what extent has general practice (family medicine) in Britain's NHS adopted industrial modes of organisation from productive (for-profit) industries?