Entrepreneurial attitudes of primary health care physicians in the United Kingdom

The 1990 re-structuring of public sector health care in the United Kingdom offered new opportunities and incentives to primary care physicians, in par ticular, the capacity for holding autonomous budgets (fundholding). Based o n the concept of enterprise, the paper analyses the results of a large-scal e national survey, with a view to illuminating economic attitudes and motiv ations amongst such physicians, It is discovered that physicians characteri sed as being more entrepreneurial were more likely to have opted for fundho lding and to have initiated innovations in service development, although al l types of physicians appeared to have responded predictably to simple fina ncial incentives. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.