BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

Business Environment

Business Environment

Introduction

National Health Service, commonly known as NHS is a health care system in United Kingdom. NHS is formed to provide a vast variety health related services, is funded completely by taxation revenue, and is not depending upon any external sources. The idea behind NHS is to provide health care services throughout United Kingdom at very low and competitive rates. Most of the services offered by NHS are free to UK citizens as well.

NHS was formed in 1948 and since then is dedicated towards providing the finest health care facilities. From antenatal diagnostics to regular treatment for elongated diseases, surgical transplants, emergency treatment etc NHS has proved to be the finest publically funded organization related to health care. A staggering 1.7 million people are employed by NHS including qualified practitioners, nurses and other staff which cater to about 53 million people in United Kingdom.

The National Health System (NHS) is responsible for British public health. Services provided include hospitals, doctors, specialists, dentists, pharmacists, opticians, and ambulances. UK has the best health care system. It provides the quality, efficiency, access to health services, gives healthy lifestyle. The medicines, sight tests, glasses, and dental treatments are subsidized. Hospitalization, ambulance services, and medical consultations are free.

Discussion

The pricing and output decisions of NHS are not affected by the other private sector hospitals. It is only prone to the government regulations and subsidies due to which its prices and output change. The Government has proposed significant change in the way the National Health Service organized in United Kingdom. This essay has made the priority of examining the planned reform to the White Paper Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS. Numerous key changes to the NHS have taken attention of critique and discussions. As results of change, the NHS will be streamlining with fewer layers of bureaucracy Strategic Health Authority and Primary Care Trust will be phasing out The National Health Service (NHS) has a strong focus on primary care General Practitioner (GP) or family doctor. Most health centres and Practices in the UK are owned by the GPs. Their income derived from providing services to the NHS. Each GP has a quota of 1500-2000 patients and patients often see a specialist if referred by a GP. The UK is a world leader in the provision of health services. Primary care has a central role within the NHS. In the late 90's, the government introduced a series of measures of quality governance to promote improvements in quality of care in family medicine. These measures were Clinical practice guidelines for the management of chronic diseases, mandatory clinical audit, record information about the quality of healthcare, and annually valuated the quality of healthcare. These measures generated significant improvements in the health care quality, especially in the chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease. NHS is working nationally for ensuring the NHS patients' records will be kept in future in an electronic format. The distinctive identifier for all the health care records has been adopted by the NHS i.e. NHS number. This NHS number helps in providing the linkage of health care records across an organizations and ...