ABSTRACT
The objectives of this chapter are to appreciate the new thinking about the UK government in the 1990s and the new ideas of strategic reform, and to consider a specific example of the use of strategic planning to reform a public services system. The OECD report on the Future of Government not only brought together the ideas of strategic vision and planning and public services reform, but it also put up for consideration the idea that effective strategic reform will depend on capacity, coherence and support. The experiences of reforming the system of the English National Health Service (NHS), which commenced in 2000 with the NHS Plan, suggested some very important lessons about the nature of successful strategic planning to bring about reforms of public services. London Patient Choice (LPC) established in 2002, it was one of nine pilot projects designed to test the feasibility of giving patients awaiting elective surgery a choice of where to undergo their operation.
