Research Paper on:
NHS Direct and Mental Health Provision in the UK; Strategic Case Study

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
some very large differences. We may argue that the goal of both of the policies and resulting project was the same; to better the health care provision in the UK  for the end users. However, the way in which they sought to do this and the strategies they used to attaint the more direct goals indicated the different cultures of  the organisations involved as well as being influenced by the underlying goals. If we look at the NHS direct initiative we see that the main goal here was to  relive the pressure on the hospital accident and emergency departments as well as reduce the overall cost of providing health advice and preventing more visits to the doctor of hospital  for many of the less urgent cases. We can see that this is questionable in terms of effectiveness, we are told in the case study that the unit costs are  broadly comparable, yet the cost of answering each call was is only ?8 compared to ?10.55 for a visit to the doctors or ?42 for a visit to the hospital.  The cost saving is evident. However, there were also many concerns over the plan. The stagy was to use technology, though both the telephone as well as the Internet and  walk in centres, to answer queries form patients in the effort to reduce the number of visits to the different health provisions. This would provide a simple to use gateway,  and help prevent additional cost in the many cases were the costs were seen as incurred unnecessarily. The stagy used to set up the call centres appears to have  been separated from the rest of the service, although there was a need for the centres to be integrated, for example advice given would often lead to the advice by