Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best Loved Institution

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Campion’s first interactions with the NHS attested to the initial high demand for its services. When attending antenatal clinics at the Chelsea Hospital for Women, she joined large numbers of women waiting on long wooden benches to see a doctor.

Across the country, the government stimulated local celebrations in a way unseen in prior years. After 2010, the Conservative Party – which had oscillated between begrudging acceptance and hostility throughout the service’s history – was forced onto New Labour’s ground in terms of rhetoric if not action. Before joining UCL in October 2023, Andrew was the Plumer Junior Research Fellow in History at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. He trained in both the UK and the USA, gaining a doctorate in History from New York University (NYU) in 2021. Hardman describes how the problems inflicted on the health service by the pandemic – trauma for staff equivalent to wartime; colossal expense; disruption of systems and cancellation of routine procedures – are unrelenting and existential. “The NHS continues to operate at a pace and level of stress that it simply has not seen in its entire history,” she writes. The resultant danger is that “patients are starting to lose faith with it in an unprecedented way, too”. Our NHSwas published in the summer of 2023, during a period of serious concern for the health service. The waiting list figures for treatment stood at their worst levels on record, strikes among health professionals unfolded across the service, and unknown numbers of NHS staff seemed to be emigrating for better conditions and pay overseas. Nonetheless, the NHS also received an enormous amount of celebration – including, a service in Westminster Abbey, an NHS ‘Big Tea’ occurring in different parts of the U.K., and a new commemorative fifty pence piece from the Royal Mint. Though I learned first-hand about the serious challenges facing the service from doctors and patients in my audiences as I spoke about the book after its publication, I also encountered public attachment to the NHS that reminded me why it had lasted through other periods of crisis. I hope that my small contribution to telling the service’s history might provide us with another perspective when we think about its future.An energetically detailed account of the evolution of the NHS into an institution that mops up roughly a third of what the government spends on public services and a tenth of gross domestic product.”—Frances Cairncross, Literary Review Both books describe party political wrangling without overt partisanship, although Seaton’s leftward tilt becomes increasingly clear in later chapters. It is explicit in his conclusion – that the tenacity of the NHS in fending off marketisation might serve as a model for the resurgence of egalitarian, social democratic politics in Britain. Association of Scottish Antimicrobial Pharmacists: Kirsteen Hill, Antimicrobial/HIV Pharmacist, NHS Tayside and Fiona McDonald, Specialist Pharmacist - Antibiotics, NHS Grampian

Professional Secretary, ScotMARAP: Ysobel Gourlay, Lead Antimicrobial Pharmacist, NHS GG&C Antimicrobial Management Team representatives All our events remain free and open to all, but pre-booking is required. Bookings for this lecture will open at 10.00am on 28 September. Andrew Seaton is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History. He is a historian of modern Britain, with particular interests in political history, social history, and the history of medicine and the environment.NHS Education for Scotland: Sabine Nolte, Principal Educator, Public Health Team, Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions (NMAHP) But the party did not always place the service on such a high pedestal. In many ways, the depth and contours of the Labour Party’s embrace of the health service is reflective of the swelling place that the NHS has enjoyed in public life over the decades since its foundation. The stories are fascinating, lightly edited, and represent a sample of interesting historical snapshots. Particularly intriguing are those from an earlier era in which universal health care wasn’t available. People living in desperate poverty couldn’t afford basic treatments; young children died for no reason; tuberculosis became curable, but many had no money for the drugs. Bevan and co were clearly right to change things. Still, the energy seems to fizzle out by the end, when Generation Z arrives. That’s no surprise: young people today are used to on-the-button customer service. They don’t want to turn up at an understaffed clinic only to wait in a four-hour queue; they want to organise healthcare with their smartphones – and they’re willing to pay for the privilege.