Everyone was entitled to treatment including visitors to the country and it would be provided free at the point of delivery. The principles included how it would be funded from general taxation and not national insurance. Eventually, the Cabinet endorsed the White Paper put forward by the Minister of Health Henry Willink in 1944, which set out the guidelines for the NHS. A year later the Beveridge Report put forward a recommendation for “comprehensive health and rehabilitation services” and was supported across the House of Commons by all parties. The issue of health provisions in Britain was a growing problem.īy 1941, the Ministry of Health was in the process of agreeing a post-war health policy with the aim that services would be available to the entire general public. The wartime period necessitated the creation of the Emergency Hospital Service to care for the wounded, making these services dependent on the government.
These discussions were not taken any further when in 1939 the outbreak of the Second World War took precedence.
There was a growing consensus that the current system of health insurance should be extended to include dependents of wage-earners and that voluntary hospitals should be integrated. Cronin had observed the medical scene greatly and the book prompted new ideas about medicine and ethics, inspiring to some extent the NHS and the ideas behind it. The book was based on a story about a doctor from a small Welsh mining village who climbed the ranks to become a doctor in London. A.J Cronin’s novel “The Citadel” was published in 1937 and proved to be highly controversial for its criticism of the inadequacies and failures of healthcare. By the time the Second World War broke out, the London Council was running the largest public service of its kind for healthcare.įurther momentum was gained when Dr. On 1st April 1930 the London County Council then took over responsibility for around 140 hospitals, medical schools and other institutions after the abolition of the Metropolitan Asylums Board. By 1929 the Local Government Act amounted to local authorities running services which provided medical treatment for everyone. In some cases local authorities ran hospitals for the local ratepayers, an approach originating with the Poor Law. It would be another thirty years before his ideas would feature in the Beveridge Plan for the NHS.īefore the creation of the NHS or anything like it, when someone found themselves needing a doctor or to use medical facilities, patients were generally expected to pay for those treatments. His ideas led him to create the State Medical Service Association which held its first meeting in 1912. His ideas were written in “The Dawn of the Health Age” and he was probably one of the first to use the phrase ‘National Health Service’.
Nevertheless, more and more people were beginning to speak out and be proactive, including Dr Benjamin Moore, a Liverpool physician who had great foresight and a pioneering vision of the future in healthcare. Despite the strong arguments provided in the report, it still proved unsuccessful and many ideas were disregarded by the new Liberal government. Those who were involved in the report believed it was a narrow-minded approach from those in charge to expect those in poverty to be entirely accountable for themselves. The report was headed by the socialist Beatrice Webb who argued that a new system was needed to replace the antiquated ideas of the Poor Law which was still in existence from the times of the workhouses in the Victorian era. These ideas can be traced back to the early 1900s with the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law in 1909. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. The creation of the NHS in 1948 was the product of years of hard work and a motivation from various figures who felt the current healthcare system was insufficient and needed to be revolutionised.Īneurin Bevan, Minister of Health, on the first day of the National Health Service, 5 July 1948 at Park Hospital, Davyhulme, near Manchester. The motivation to provide a good, strong and reliable healthcare to all was finally taking its first tentative steps. The National Health Service, abbreviated to NHS, was launched by the then Minister of Health in Attlee’s post-war government, Aneurin Bevan, at the Park Hospital in Manchester. On the 5th July 1948 an historic moment occurred in British history, a culmination of a bold and pioneering plan to make healthcare no longer exclusive to those who could afford it but to make it accessible to everyone.
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