Article by Cllr Dick Cole first published in Cornish Guardian newspaper (5th July 2023)
Seventy-five years ago today, on 5th July 1948, the Health Secretary Nye Bevan launched the National Health Service at Manchester’s Park Hospital.
It is well reported that Bevan symbolically met the NHS’s “first patient,” a 13-year-old girl called Sylvia Diggory. She later recalled: “Mr Bevan asked me if I understood the significance of the occasion and told me that it was a milestone in history – the most civilised step any country had ever taken.”
In 1948, the fundamental principles behind the new health service were clear. The NHS would be “available to all” and “financed entirely from taxation,” meaning that “people pay into it according to their means.” And in his seminal 1952 publication, In Place of Fear, Bevan himself wrote, that: “No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.”
It is frankly not possible to overstate the significance of the NHS. It is undeniable that universal healthcare has transformed the lives of millions and millions of people. This was all summed up well by Gordon Brown, when he was Prime Minister and marked the NHS’s 60th anniversary in 2008. He said: “Bevan’s vision has stood both the test of time and the test of change unimaginable in his day … surviving, growing and adapting to technological and demographic change” while still being at the “centre of the life of our nation as a uniquely British creation, and a uniquely powerful engine of social justice.”
It is right that we are proud of the NHS, but when I wrote about the 70th anniversary of the health service in this newspaper, I noted that: “The NHS has been a permanent fixture in the news. It has not all been good news with concerns about the lack of hospital beds in numerous areas, inappropriate pressure on junior doctors, the pressing need to better link healthcare with social care and, not least, the ongoing NHS funding crisis.”
Five years on, such pressures remain. We have seen the impact of the pandemic, progress to better link healthcare and social care continues to be slow and there has been unprecedented industrial action by a wide range of NHS staff, including nurses who remain concerned that “low pay is driving chronic understaffing.”
As we remember Nye Bevan’s conversation with Sylvia Diggory, we must look to the future and there is a compelling need to build a strong consensus across all political parties and all sectors of society to safeguard the NHS, while making sure that the staff at its heart are properly appreciated and rewarded for their fantastic work.