[The French and English health systems: compared evolution after the mid-1990s]

In the recent past, the British and French health care systems have both undergone significant reforms, enveloped in a state of Urgency, resulting primarily in France from the increasing rate of growth in health expenditure and in England from malfunctioning procedures such as waiting lists. After describing current features of the National Health Service (NHS), this study extracts and considers the points of convergence and divergence in the respective policies of the two countries: similarities in the choice of priorities, decentralisation of decision-making, negotiation between actors at the local level, development of the quality concept, and the differences in formulating objectives and involving the system's users. The considerations provided here should allow for a better understanding of the developments of these respective health policies and their future evolution.