Harnessing deliberative regulation to address inequities in accessing healthcare services in England

Sabrina Germain and Gianluca Veronesi

Medical Law Review, 2025, vol. 33, issue 1, 8.

Abstract: System-level decisions around the commissioning and provision of healthcare services in England have contributed to barriers in accessing the National Health Service. In this article, we ask how to better regulate resource allocation to ensure greater equity in access to healthcare services. First, we focus on the Health and Care Act 2022, which, drawing on principles of deliberative regulation to address health inequalities, initiates a shift away from previous regulatory approaches towards a collaborative decision-making model. We then shed light on the systemic factors creating and maintaining access barriers by considering shortcomings in previous regulatory approaches. With these in mind, we consider whether deliberative regulation—providing communities with resources to create normative solutions to intrinsic issues—could help address these systemic challenges. To assess the potential of laws or policies to achieve greater equity in healthcare, we also introduce an evaluative framework based on deliberative principles. We apply this framework to a case study of an Integrated Care System to gauge the extent to which the Health and Care Act 2022 has indeed been effectively adopting a deliberative approach by intentionally engaging marginalized communities in decision-making and devising accountability mechanisms for the allocation of healthcare resources.

Keywords: deliberative regulation; health equity; integrated care systems; marginalized groups; NHS; resource allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/medlaw/fwae042 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:medlaw:v:33:y:2025:i:1:p:8.

Access Statistics for this article

Medical Law Review is currently edited by Professor Sara Fovargue and Professor Jose Miola

More articles in Medical Law Review from Oxford University Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().