Health Policy and the NHS provides a thorough and up-to-date review of the changes in the structure and organisation of the health service. It focuses on how sucessive governments have approached problems of health care, their policy assumptions and the economic and political context of their decision making. Divided into four parts the text considers in turn: the foundations and framework of the NHS, policy issues within the NHS that dominated the government's policy agenda until the late 1980s, health and society and the critiques of health policy which developed in the late 1970s and 1980s, and new directions for health policy in the future.