Modernising health care: Reinventing professions, the state and the public

Abstract

Modernising health care: Reinventing professions, the state and the public is a crucial contribution to debates about the rapid modernisation of health care systems and the dynamics of changing modes of governance and citizenship. Structured around the role of the professions as mediators between state and citizens, and set against a background of tighter resources and growing demands for citizenship rights, Ellen Kuhlmann’s book offers a much-needed comparative analysis, using the German health care system as a case study. The German system, with its strongly self-regulatory medical profession, exemplifies both the capacity of professionalism to re-make itself, and the role of the state in response, highlighting the benefits and dangers of medical self-regulation, while demonstrating the potential for change beyond marketisation and managerialism. Kuhlmann critically reviews dominant models of provider control and user participation, and empirically investigates different sets of dynamics in health care, including tensions between global reform models and nation-specific conditions; interprofessional dynamics and changing gender arrangements; the role of the service-user as a new stakeholder in health care; and the rise of a new professionalism shaped by social inclusion. Modernising health care provides new approaches and a wealth of new empirical data for academics and students of health policy, medical sociology and sociology of professions, and for health policy makers and managers.