Professional Power and the Need for Health Care

This work is a critical ethnography of decision making with respect to the assessment of health care need in the UK health systems.

Theories of need, justice, and rights are reviewed in relation to the structural changes that have occurred to the Health Service in recent years.

To illustrate the arguments, a case study of planning services for kidney failure patients is used.

The decisions of a group of professionals involved in an independent review of government services evaluates critically using particular theories of need and communicative action.

The relationship between needs, as understood and defined by medical and managerial groups, and markets form the focus for a more general critique of the reformed UK health system.