The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the performance of Italian and British National Health services.

The goal of this research is to highlight how the pandemic affected the National Health systems of Italy and the United Kingdom. The two countries have been picked because their nationalized systems stem from different historical contexts that led also to the creation of different welfare systems, and of course. After all, both countries suffered heavily from the pandemic. This leads to different approaches and routes that national governments can take to tackle any kind of issue. Whether that will be by delegating to local communities or by simply trying to harmonize on a national level the general course of action, depends on the issue at hand. Undoubtedly Covid-19 put most countries under serious stress. Italy’s most recognizable characteristic during this health crisis has arguably been the role of its regions, and the disregard that some of them felt towards national decisions; this led to actions that hardly respected order from higher national and health authorities, but that, however, could have respected more the needs and possibilities of local governments. The UK has made itself famous for its policy of finding its own route and the lack of scrupulous tracing and the avoidance of lockdowns. This work is structured into three main chapters, leading to the main conclusions and observations. The first chapter aims at explaining what performance means and how its definition can be bent to apply to different contexts. The second chapter focuses on the pandemic itself, considering data and statistics from the two case studies and then trying to find out whether such data could have been influenced by a different managerial approach of the nationalized healthcare systems. The third chapter pertains to the health systems themselves, considering their origins to give some context and highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, to begin with, to then apply the concepts from chapter one to this area and giving a possible forecast in the short, medium and long run. Lastly, the conclusion will summarize the findings and acknowledge possible new topics of research. The sources consulted will mainly be previous work from different researchers, as well as international organizations providing the statistical data that I will need to conduct this analysis.