Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

CiteULike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references - click here to get started.

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Evaluation
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via HighWire
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Mays, N.
Right arrow Articles by Evans, D.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

The Evaluation of Complex Health Policy

Lessons from the UK Total Purchasing Experiment

Nicholas Mays

The Treasury, New Zealand

Sally Wyke

University of Edinburgh, UK

David Evans

University of the West of England, UK

The last five years have witnessed the increasing use of evaluated pilot programmes as a way of developing health services policy in the UK. Total purchasing was the first major quasi-market development in the National Health Service to be independently evaluated from the outset. The initiative allowed local, volunteer pilots considerable freedom to implement extensions to existing arrangements for general practitioner budget holding for specialist services in the National Health Service. The experience indicates that future evaluations of similarly complex innovations should give attention to developing explanatory frameworks (i.e. theories), which include consideration of the impact of the context in which interventions are introduced on their potential outcomes. Such an approach should help in ensuring the generalizability of evaluations through theory building and thus increase their relevance for policy development. In addition, evaluations must be designed to be capable of accommodating the needs of changing policy imperatives if they are to have long-term usefulness.

Key Words: context • health-policy innovations • programme evaluation • relationship between research and policy making • total purchasing

Evaluation, Vol. 7, No. 4, 405-426 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/135638900100700402
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 EvaluationHome page
N. Touati, R. Pineault, F. Champagne, J.-L. Denis, A. Brousselle, A.-P. Contandriopoulos, and R. Geneau
Evaluating Service Organization Models: The Relevance and Methodological Challenges of a Configurational Approach
Evaluation, October 1, 2009; 15(4): 375 - 401.
[Abstract] [PDF]

Home page
 American Journal of EvaluationHome page
S. Jacob
Cross-Disciplinarization: A New Talisman for Evaluation?
American Journal of Evaluation, June 1, 2008; 29(2): 175 - 194.
[Abstract] [PDF]

Home page
 Journal of Social WorkHome page
H. Qureshi
Evidence in Policy and Practice: What Kinds of Research Designs?
Journal of Social Work, April 1, 2004; 4(1): 7 - 23.
[Abstract] [PDF]