The National Health Service
1948 1948 1940s 38 pages midwives, or doctors of all kinds for the needs of all the people. In some ways the war made these shortages worse. It is a main aim of the new Health Service to enlarge facilities and bring equipment up to date as quickly as is practicable — and above all to make...
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| Institution: | MCR - The Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick |
| Language: | English English |
| Published: |
London : His Majesty's Stationery Office
1948
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10796/3804A883-26A0-4649-960A-CFE0A2D63A7D http://hdl.handle.net/10796/03CB3C10-115D-4104-991E-EC3FC250CC60 |
| Summary: | 1948
1948
1940s
38 pages
midwives, or doctors of all kinds for the needs of all the people. In some ways the war made these shortages worse. It is a main aim of the new Health Service to enlarge facilities and bring equipment up to date as quickly as is practicable — and above all to make what there is equally accessible to all. The shortages themselves indicated that new forms of organisation were required to rescue the health of the people from what Lord Horder called 'the maze, the unwieldiness, the overlap, the uneconomy, the lack of integration of our health services'. Many of these difficulties will eventually be removed by means of better organisation, although new resources must be adopted before the services can be complete. There was one immediate change on 5th July — nobody need any longer pay doctors' bills and hospital bills when they are sick. Consideration of fees has ceased to be an obstacle between a patient and the medical care he requires. The wealth or poverty of an individual becomes irrelevant to health care, as it should be. Bills are paid collectively instead of individually. The clubbing together of all citizens to meet the cost of medical care provides free service for any citizen at the moment when he needs it. There need be no more bargaining over fees, or arguments about insurance status. The full bill for the National Health Service, averaged over the whole population, comes out at just about half a crown per head per week. A very large part of the total cost was previously paid in hospital charges and as private fees, and so represents a re-distribution of national spending and not a new strain on the economy. Yet clearly the present expenditure can be justified only on the basis that the essential aim of the Service, and all who work in it, must be to prevent illness. It has been estimated that loss of production due to absenteeism through sickness costs the country at least £300,000,000 a year — and this figure does not include reduction of working capacity due to poor health and bad eyesight. Much of this absenteeism and impaired capacity is preventable. Why a Change was Needed Looking at the old Health Services as a whole, it is not difficult to see why a new scheme was needed. Those Services were everybody's business yet nobody's full responsibility. Although insured workers could get medical treatment free, their wives and children could not, and over half the population had to make private arrangements for medical care, whether with a personal doctor, a specialist, or a hospital. For many middle-class people excluded from compulsory and voluntary insurance a serious illness in the family could be ruinously expensive. In order to fill the widest gaps in the system, public services and voluntary schemes of mutual assistance were added to deal with particular needs as they 3
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| Physical Description: | TEXT |