ABSTRACT
This chapter describes two British efforts to subject professional communities to such self-evaluation, the first in higher education and the second in health care, and deals with a discussion of the patterns and issues arising from this comparison. Internal evaluating professionals are less likely to use self-evaluation for allocating praise and blame than for learning and development and this may have implications for the evaluative information they provide. On the other hand, such assessments may be more likely to be digestible by their communities, a feature that itself may be a strong functional argument for self-evaluation. The government’s first reference to clinical governance, in The New National Health Service (NHS): modern dependable defined it as an instrument: to assure and improve clinical standards at local level throughout the NHS. All state-funded higher education institutions were invited to make their submissions by March 31, 2001.
