Accountable care? An analysis of national reporting on local health and social care service integration

Abstract

This paper analyses how the UK national press has covered local decision-making on options for the integration of health and social care. In England, as part of a major restructuring of health services, the UK government has devolved significant decisions on reorganising services to local areas. This increasing ‘localism’ in healthcare has been a global trend, albeit an uneven one. The article assesses the insights of Amitai Etzioni and others, as applied to national newspaper coverage of local decisions. It finds Etzioni’s analysis to be not fully supported. Following other journalism research on the NHS, we show that contentious points of wider public interest were little reported on, such as international corporate influence and the potential for fragmentation across a national health service.