Planning Health Care Services and the Views of the Consumer Available to Purchase

The process of reviewing and changing health care services in the UK rarely takes account of the needs or preferences of the public as expressed by the consumers themselves. This is largely because no sufficiently sensitive mechanisms exist within the National Health Service for sounding out and obtaining consumer opinion; and health care professionals have traditionally felt that they know what is best for their patients and clients and anyway that the issues are too complicated for the public to grasp. This paper challenges this assumption and describes how one health region has embarked upon a direct approach to the consumer.