Converting Patients into Consumers: Consumerism and the Charter of Rights for Hospital Patients

Abstract

This paper examines consumerism in public health policy and focuses on a specific strategy to make Irish hospital services more consumer-oriented, namely, patients' charters. The first part of the paper examines different conceptualisations of the ‘new consumerism’ in the social policy literature and locates its emergence within the broader context of the ‘marketisation’ of the welfare state. A brief review of the literature on the merits and limitations of public sector consumerism is then presented. The second part of the paper concentrates on the emergence of the new consumerism in Irish public health policy, and the results of a study that examined the implementation of the Charter of Rights for Hospital Patients are presented. A key finding of the study was that none of the hospitals in the study area had fully implemented the provisions of the Charter. Furthermore, only 26 per cent of a sample of one hundred hospital patients had heard of the Charter and only 10 per cent could recall any of the rights that it conferred on patients. The paper concludes by suggesting that the Charter of Rights for Hospital Patients is less concerned with empowering patients than it is with other agendas, such as creating a semblance of closeness to the users of health services and counterbalancing medical authority.