Community Well-Being in the Era of Health Care Privatisation

The Health and Social Care Act (HSCA) (2012) was recent legislation that entrusted £80bn of UK health commissioning budget to newly formed Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). During and following the passing into statute of the HSCA in 2012, a number of dimensions of this manoeuvre emerged concerning what this legislation meant for the delivery of healthcare nationally and locally. Thereafter the Brighton Citizens’ Health Services Survey (BCHSS) sought to capture unmeasured and excluded forms of knowledge representing the voices of the people of Brighton and Hove on important topical health issues like funding cuts, privatisation and the broader tensions between local commissioning and national funding policy directives. This contribution explores the way that research straddling the boundary between academic inquiry and political activism speaks to the many issues that are prevalent in the changing health sector, particularly the NHS privatisation, health commissioning and public sector cuts.