ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book aims to help healthcare workers understand the nature of the problems they are facing and their collective capacities in tackling them. It discusses the principles and practices that underpin the relational model, taken from different educational, psychoanalytic and industrial relations traditions. The book focuses on the growth of New Public Management (NPM) techniques to address a problem of demand outweighing supply in healthcare by reducing it to a technical problem of staff productivity and efficiencies. The use of nationally set productivity targets combined with austerity cuts has increasingly put clinical best-practice into direct conflict with funding. This has led to a cynical culture of gaming in NHS management – where ticking boxes has become a parallel system of political football. Frontline teams and managers operate in a parallel universe – often totally cut off from management decision making, training and informed research.
