BMJ 2002;325:895-900 ( 19 October )

Education and debate

The use and impact of inquiries in the NHS

Kieran Walshe, reader in public management and director of research, Joan Higgins, professor of health policy and director. 

Manchester Centre for Healthcare Management, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL

Correspondence to: Dr Walshe
kieran.walshe@man.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

When things go wrong in the NHS an inquiry is often set up to find how what happened and what can be learnt. Kieran Walshe and Joan Higgins show that since the 1970s inquiries have been resorted to increasingly often to investigate service failures. Such inquiries take various forms, but the pressures seem to be increasing for them to be set up as independent external investigations with full inquisitorial powers

In the past few years the NHS has been subject to several major inquiries. Such inquiries have been established to investigate poor clinical performance, major service failure, or even criminal misconduct, and they seem to have become an increasingly common political and managerial response to any major problem in the NHS. As a result, the costs, methods and effects of inquiries have begun to be questioned.1

This paper explores the use and impact of inquiries in the NHS. It presents . . . [Full text of this article]
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