The dynamics of health care organisation in Britain

The National Health Service provides a 'policy puzzle' to British governments: how to cope with rising demands in a service which is extremely popular with the public, whilst maintaining economic orthodoxy with regard to public expenditure. The limited number of options for reconciling these tensions has provided the menu from which successive recent policies for organising and managing the Service have been drawn, and from which governments will continue to have to choose over the next few years.