Elsevier

Social Science & Medicine

Volume 113, July 2014, Pages 110-119
Social Science & Medicine

Are public–private partnerships a healthy option? A systematic literature review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.03.037Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Governments turn to private sector involvement in developing, financing and providing health infrastructure and services.

  • These public–private partnerships (PPPs) carry important organizational strategy, management and policy implications.

  • We combine comprehensive bibliographic and content analyses of over 1400 PPP papers published over the last two decades.

  • Despite the significance of PPPs, there is limited prior conceptualization and in-depth empirical investigation.

  • We synthesize formerly dispersed research perspectives into a comprehensive multi-dimensional framework of PPPs.

Abstract

Governments around the world, but especially in Europe, have increasingly used private sector involvement in developing, financing and providing public health infrastructure and service delivery through public–private partnerships (PPPs). Reasons for this uptake are manifold ranging from rising expenditures for refurbishing, maintaining and operating public assets, and increasing constraints on government budgets stifle, seeking innovation through private sector acumen and aiming for better risk management. Although PPPs have attracted practitioner and academic interest over the last two decades, there has been no attempt to integrate the general and health management literature to provide a holistic view of PPPs in healthcare delivery. This study analyzes over 1400 publications from a wide range of disciplines over a 20-year time period. We find that despite the scale and significance of the phenomenon, there is relatively limited conceptualization and in-depth empirical investigation. Based on bibliographic and content analyses, we synthesize formerly dispersed research perspectives into a comprehensive multi-dimensional framework of public-private partnerships. In so doing, we provide new directions for further research and practice.

Keywords

Public–private partnership
Public and private actors
Health management
Management practice
Systematic literature review
Content analysis
Bibliographic analysis

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