Accountability is a way of monitoring the conduct of governments, and public agencies. Mechanisms of accountability give us the possibility to control the input into public policies, as well as the output. When accountability relationships become unclear it may have consequences for how public organizations behave and how governments, but also indirectly citizens, can control and influence them. If the relations become a tangled web it also can become unclear who is accountable to whom, and for what, and even why. It is for this reason that this paper aims to address the state of political accountability relationships in the hospital sector in Germany and Norway.
Hospitals play an important role in the health care system since it encompasses large financial investments and expenditures, many employees, and it plays an important part of many peoples life. In the German and Norwegian case, as well as in other countries, the hospital sector can have notions of complex accountability relations and systems. The paper will study the relationship between, on the one hand, organization of the hospital sector and, on the other hand, the accountability relationships.
The research topic for this paper is to describe the political accountability relationships for publicly owned hospitals in Germany and Norway in light of the recent reform activity in the hospital sector. The aim of the paper is to explore and discuss the mechanisms and structures which produce political accountability relationships in the health care sector, and more specifically the publicly owned hospitals.
