PUBLIC GOVERNANCE AND PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP IN HEALTHCARE: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF CONCEPTUAL INTERRELATIONS

The purpose of the study is to empirically determine the interrelation between the concepts of «public governance» and «public-private partnership» in healthcare by analyzing the frequency of their usage in the scientific literature indexed in the Google Scholar database. A quantitative content analysis was employed to achieve this objective. A conceptual matrix of terms related to «public administration» was developed, and search queries were formulated to identify the number of scientific publications containing these concepts and their combinations with «public-private partnership» and «healthcare». The empirical analysis revealed that the concepts of public administration, public management, and public governance are used more frequently than those of state administration, state management, and state governance. It was established that the majority of scholarly works focus on the concept of public administration in relation to public-private partnership in healthcare. The Ukrainian-language academic field demonstrated that the notion of public administration is more frequently mentioned than that of state administration, with public administration being more closely associated with public-private partnerships. However, the level of academic research addressing public-private partnerships in healthcare remains low. It was identified that the combined usage of the concepts «public governance», «public-private partnership» and «healthcare» occurs in a limited number of publications, indicating an insufficient level of problematization in this field. Thus, the study confirms the dominance of the public administration about public-private partnerships in the healthcare sector. Public administration emerges as a more relevant theoretical framework for the development of public-private partnerships in the healthcare sector in Ukraine.