Jacob Christensen

I’ve been following the rather strange story about the contracting-out of ambulance and transport services performed by the Danish regions. What appears to have happened is that a small Swedish firm which has mainly been providing ambulance transports in Stockholm won some or most of the contracts in several of the regions, only to withdraw before the final contracts were entered – or to use the formulation used in media: Sent back (to Sweden, that is). The effect will be to enhance Falck’s effective monopoly on ambulance services in Denmark.

So what went wrong here?

Professor A argues that the regions made bad preparations in the contracting process, professor B that the Swedish firm was underfunded and should never have entered the contracting process.

I can’t recall a contracting process going so much off the rails so there should be material for some studies in policy failures here. Still, the nationalistic overtones in the relative descriptions of Falck and Samariten are interesting – I mean, as if Falck wasn’t a fairly large international company these days.