The National Health Service
1948 1948 1940s 38 pages the Home Counties. The largest, the south-west Metropolitan region, stretches from Marble Arch to Hove and the outskirts of Lyme Regis. Why the Hospitals Have Been Taken Over Why have these changes been made? For many years experts have argued in favour of a hospital syste...
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| Institution: | MCR - The Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick |
| Language: | English English |
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London : His Majesty's Stationery Office
1948
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10796/2022DDC3-5685-4449-82E3-90A5677DF948 http://hdl.handle.net/10796/E0E0BA4E-58B7-49A3-80B7-367DE248CBE5 |
| Summary: | 1948
1948
1940s
38 pages
the Home Counties. The largest, the south-west Metropolitan region, stretches from Marble Arch to Hove and the outskirts of Lyme Regis. Why the Hospitals Have Been Taken Over Why have these changes been made? For many years experts have argued in favour of a hospital system planned to serve wide regions of the country. Such planning could work well only if the regional authorities could make drastic changes. They would need to amalgamate some hospitals too small to be efficient as single units, to alter the functions of many more, to close down others, and to build new ones. All this could not be properly done if the hospitals were still owned by some 2,000 separate, and often jealous and conflicting, local public or voluntary authorities ; nor could the voluntary hospitals be guaranteed the financial security they so badly needed. The new regional authorities had to be given the power to plan and reorganise which goes with common ownership. Moreover, voluntary and municipal hospitals were managed and did their work in different ways, and each way had its good and its bad features. An aim of the new service was to keep and combine the good and to discard the bad features of both kinds of hospitals. For this purpose hospital authorities of a new kind were needed — bodies with neither the municipal nor the voluntary tradition, able to fuse what was best in both methods into a new and better service. As they would be spending the public's money, these new bodies had to be public authorities answerable in one way or another to the representatives of the people. They could not be local authorities or formed out of groups of local authorities, so they had to be appointed by a Minister responsible to Parliament. In order to give the regional boards full control, voluntary and municipal hospitals have therefore been transferred to the formal ownership of the State. The hospitals transferred were the existing voluntary and municipal hospitals with their clinics and other associated institutions required for the new Service. Some hospitals (usually small ones), such as nursing homes, institutions run by religious orders, disused and unsuitable isolation hospitals, have not been taken over. Nursing homes run for private profit, and voluntary institutions created in the future cannot be taken over except by purchase. The Minister has power to purchase, compulsorily if necessary, land and buildings needed for hospitals, just as a local authority has powers of compulsory purchase when it needs land or buildings in order to provide houses or schools. But there is no question of using these powers to set up a State monopoly of hospitals and nursing homes. Some hospitals connected with particular denominations have been transferred to the Minister ; the Act requires the preservation of their 'character and associations'. 10
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| Physical Description: | TEXT |