Public-Private Partnerships in Hospital Policy
A common feature of health reforms in western nations has been the
transformation or (re)construction of health and health care as both
a commodity and product. In the hospital sector, this transformation
has become increasingly evident in the growth of for-profit involvement
in service delivery. Investor-owned hospitals are now prominent providers
of hospital care in Australia. In contrast, up to the early 1980s, the
private sector was seen as a cottage industry. However, increased levels
of state subsidisation and government incentives and pro-market policies,
combined with market based opportunities for profit generation, have
seen the emergence of large private hospital chains with a new corporate
image to hospital care and the blurring of ‘public’ and
‘private’. A significant factor in the reconstruction of
hospital space in Australia has been the co-location of private and
public hospitals. Co-location is a popular strategy proffered by State
governments and one that has been quickly acted on by corporate providers.
This project has three objectives. First, it aims to explore the ongoing corporatisation of hospital care in Australia. Secondly, it examines how the creation of these new hybridized health care spaces have affected consumer demand for private hospital care in selected Australian cities. Third, it examines the public and private benefits and risks of the development of these new forms of public-private partnership, and fourth, it places these trends in the wider context of global developments in public-private partnerships in hospital policy.
Staff involved
- Assoc. Prof. Ross Barnett
- Dr Laurie Brown (NATSEM, Canberra, Australia)
- Professor John Mohan (Institute for the Geography of Health, Portsmouth, UK