ACCOUNTING AND MANAGEMENT INNOVATIOS IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR:

THE CASE OF THE SPANISH HEALTHCARE SYSTEM.

Mª Yolanda Calzado Cejas

Universidad de Cadiz

e-mail: yolanda.calzado@.uca.es

Joaquina Laffarga Briones

Universidad de Sevilla

e-mail: quina@cica.es

Abstrac

One of the features of the New Public Management is the incorporation in the Public Sector of private business management techniques.

The need to manage the resources available in the spanish health care sector more efficiently has generated a controversial political debate about the future of our National Health Service, which intensified in the late 1990's.

The spanish health system has elected, among other measures, to introduce new organizational forms of management, theoretically, distinct from a bureaucratic hierarchy model.

On the other hand, health care is one of the sectors that is strongly pressured by the prevailing economic, social, political and administrative environment of any given country.

The management of the resources with efficiency as a criteria can bring about the need to introduce more informative accounting systems in the organizations integrated in to the National Health Service.

Given these circumstances, the aim of this paper focuses in analyzing if the Spanish health care sector has a favorable or unfavorable environment in terms of designing more informative accounting systems. For this reason, and as a methodological instrument, we will use the Accounting Innovations Model in the Public Sector, also known as Contingency Model.

In the spanish case we will analyze each one of the modules which form a part of the model with the aim of determining the variables which either directly or indirectly can explain the accounting innovation processes.