The UK’s National Clinical Assessment Agency (NCAS) is designed specifically to provide advice on performance issues, on request, to NHS organisations employing or contracting with doctors, pharmacists, and dentists. Currently, the NCAS is financed from central NHS funds, not from charges to NHS organisations. By 2013, however, the NCAS is to become self-funding.

This Research Paper reports on a project meant to establish how much referrers in the NHS value NCAS’s services and the relative value placed on different attributes and types of service. Funded by an unrestricted grant from the National Clinical Assessment Service, the project used a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to elicit information from potential referrers, including a discrete choice experiment that provided estimates of value and willingness to pay.

A revised version of this paper has been published in Health Policy and can be downloaded from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168851011002739

Please cite as: Watson, V., Sussex, J., Ryan, M. and Tetteh, E., 2012. Managing poorly performing clinicians: Health care providers’ willingness to pay for independent help. Health Policy, 104(3), pp.260-271.