Examining The Impact of New Public Management on Military Healthcare in Canada

Abstract

The Canadian Armed Forces are responsible for the provision of healthcare to military personnel in Canada. They have enacted multiple transformation initiatives with the objective to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health service delivery over the last forty years. This thesis explored the long-term institutional impacts of one of these transformation initiatives that occurred from 1993 to 1999: Operation Phoenix. The central policy proposal of this initiative was to offload a significant portion of healthcare delivery to civilian health systems to streamline resource usage while maintaining service excellence. Utilizing principles of New Public Management outlined by Christopher Hood (1987; 1991) as a theoretical framework to assess the impact of structural changes and drawing on extensive document analysis of publicly available government documents and other literature, this thesis levels an extensive critique of the poor implementation of Operation Phoenix, and argues that the impacts of this poor implementation have led to increased costs driven by this civilian healthcare reliance, unaddressed and ongoing strategic and operational management issues, and varying access to and quality of care for military personnel. Findings from this thesis may contribute to theories of New Public Management and public administration, operationalizations of new public management principles in the Canadian federal government, and in structural political analysis of a federal healthcare system.