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Article published In:
Multimodality, Politics and Ideology
Edited by David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen
[Journal of Language and Politics 15:3] 2016
► pp. 288–303

Opening up the NHS to market

Using multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine the ongoing commercialisation of health care

| Lancaster University, UK
| University of Nottingham, UK

Since its implementation, the British Government’s controversial 2013 Health and Social Care Act has had far-reaching effects on health care provision in England, not least the creation of 212 regional practitioner-led clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) which are now responsible for much of the service provision across the country. Taking as an example the website of one of these new commissioning groups, this study shows that multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) can reveal how health and social care matters are being increasingly framed within a corporate and neoliberal set of ideas, values, identities and social relations. Despite government assurances that the Act preserves the (non-commercial) founding values of the NHS, our MCDA provides textual evidence of the influence of neoliberal and commercial discourses operating across this particular website, which appear to be just as much about promoting an appealing corporate identity as responding to the practical, day-to-day concerns of patients.

Keywords: Clinical commissioning groups, NHS, commercialisation, neoliberalism, privatisation, marketisation, multimodal critical discourse analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The 2012 Health and Social Care Act and the (on-going) privatisation of public health provision
  • 3.Data and Method
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1The NNE commercial brand
    • 4.2Representing social actors: the patient-practitioner partnership
    • 4.3Representing processes: the idealised and abstracted health care encounter
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 August 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.15.3.04bro
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