Across many countries professional governance is under the spotlight of health policy makers and subject to public debate. This book provides new data and geopolitical perspectives in the debate over how to govern healthcare. It sets out to highlight new international directions and the significance of national contexts for the changing health workforce based on complex sets of cultural and institutional regulatory patterns. One central goal of the new health policies that are emerging is accountability and control of professionals, which in turn calls for tighter regulation and new forms of professional development. However, the dominant models of health reform have been developed in Anglo-American health systems and need broader comparative analysis and new approaches.

One novel feature of the book is the linkage of international directions in professional governance and workforce change to developments in the various continental European countries, including the different types of transformation states of Southern, Central and Eastern Europe. Another novelty is the expansion of the public debate on professional governance – hitherto mainly limited to physicians and medical self-regulation – to a broad range of healthcare providers, from nurses and midwives to alternative therapists and health support workers. A third innovative feature is the framing of professional development in the context of broader societal trends involving increasing flexibility, mobility and individualisation as well as changing gender arrangements and ethnic diversity. The connecting link between the different topics and countries is the exploration of political, institutional and cultural changes – related to globalisation, European unification and new governance approaches – and workforce dynamics.

In bringing together research from a wide range of continental European countries – as well as the United Kingdom (UK), Canada and Australia – the book therefore highlights different arenas of governance and the various players involved in the policy process. It helps to clarify the significance of national regulatory frameworks and better understand the enabling conditions for, and the barriers to, making professionals more accountable to a more demanding public. As such, it opens up new perspectives on the policy options to ensure that public services and the groups that deliver these are more responsive to the interests of citizens.