The National Health Service (NHS) turned 75 on Wednesday, prompting a celebration of NHS staff and providing a time to consider the service’s future.
Many people can now be cured of sickness or live happily with complex medical issues thanks to enormous advances in science and technology over the past 75 years.
To celebrate the milestone, the Royal Mint has created a collectable 50p coin, with all net proceeds to be donated to NHS Charities Together, which supports NHS staff and patients.
The NHS was also celebrated at Glastonbury, with NHS staff performing a poem on the Pyramid stage.
Furthermore, the BBC will air a special series of programming across BBC News, BBC Radio 4 and Radio 5 Live to consider the future of the NHS.
When was the NHS first created?
The NHS was created in post-war Britain on July 5, 1948. It was the first universal health system that was free to everyone.
Just two weeks earlier, on June 21, more than a thousand people arrived in the UK from the West Indies – who became known as the Windrush Generation – and many of them began careers with the NHS.
Who founded the NHS?
The NHS was founded under a Labour government, when Clement Attlee was prime minister. The health secretary, Aneurin Bevan, was responsible for introducing the service.
“The picture I have always visualised is one, not of ‘panel doctoring’ for the less well-off, not of anything charitable or demeaning,” Bevan wrote in the British Medical Journal in 1948, in a message to the medical professionals of the UK, “but rather of a nation deciding to make health care easier and more effective by pooling its resources – each sharing the cost as he can through regular taxation and otherwise while he is well, and each able to use the resulting resources if and when he is ill.”
Why was the NHS founded?
The purpose of creating the NHS was to provide free healthcare to the public and to move away from the insurance-based system the UK previously had.
The founding of the NHS was prompted by the 1942 Beveridge report, which called for a state welfare system to help reduce disease, among other issues.
The 1946 National Health Service Act stated that it “shall be the duty of the Minister of Health to promote the establishment of a health service to secure improvement in the physical and mental health of the people and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness.”
Another aim of the act was to bring together a range of medical services, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, opticians and dentists.
How is it being celebrated?
There will be charity tea parties (more details on the NHS Big Tea website), royal visits and a thanksgiving ceremony at Westminster Abbey to commemorate the occasion.
