Foreword

The structure of professional regulation in health care emerged as an important policy issue in the early 1990s. The initial discussion of regulatory reform had already begun a decade earlier at the more general policy level in many countries (Baldwin et al, 1998). Subsequently, in the health sector, once previously in lockstep, publicly administered hospitals in many Western and Central European countries were transformed into varying degrees of semi-autonomous and/or self-managing organisations (Saltman et al, 2011). Responding to this change, governments introduced revised regulatory arrangements through which to supervise provider behaviour and ensure clinically, financially and socially satisfactory outcomes. These