Organisational Networks — Can They Deliver Improvements in Health Care?

Networks are increasingly being used as a mode of governance within public management, with various advantages claimed for them in the policy domain over and above traditional governance modes of markets and hierarchies. But are they as effective as claimed? How can one indeed begin to assess the ‘performance’ of such networks? In the first part of this chapter, we will review the current literature on performance assessment in relation to public services networks and outline a performance assessment framework. In the second part, we apply and develop the framework to a particular case – assessing performance in a UK health care network. We draw out the more general lessons in the conclusion which indicate the complexities of making such judgements.