Since its implementation, the British Government’s controversial 2013 Health and Social
Care Act has had far-reaching effects on English health care provision, not least the creation
of 212 regional practitioner-led clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) which are now
responsible for much of the service provision across the country. Taking as an example the
website of one of these new commissioning groups, this study shows that multimodal critical
discourse analysis (MCDA) can reveal how health and social care matters are being
increasingly framed within a corporate and neoliberal set of ideas, values, identities and
social relations. Despite government assurances that the Act preserves the (non-commercial)
founding values of the NHS, our MCDA provides textual evidence of the influence of
neoliberal and commercial discourses operating across CCG websites, which appear to
prioritise corporate rather than the practical, day-to-day concerns of patients.