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

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National Clinical Safety Lead for Quality and Safety: Dr John Harden, A&E Consultant, NHS Lanarkshire / Scottish Government 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.

Today I want to say thank you to all the staff. I know how hard you work, how dedicated you are and how much you sacrifice. The wide lens and varied material that underpins the book allowed me to answer two central questions. First, why did the NHS take on such popular acclaim? After all, it was not inevitable at the service’s inception in 1948 that it would one day regularly top opinion polls of what made people ‘most proud to be British’. Second, why did the institution survive to achieve such significance, given that many other parts of the welfare state or public industries also founded in the mid-twentieth century became residualised or privatised? Our NHSinsists that neither the institution’s acclaim nor its survival were automatic or pre-ordained. Instead, the book shows the active work that was required to embed and adapt the service to social change, outmanoeuvre free-market critics, and associated the institution with Britishness itself. By highlighting these dynamics, I build on insights from prior historical scholarship (often informed by social science) that explained the resilience of welfare states through structural factors like the advantages of pooling risks or the power of ‘path dependence’ in social policy. I show that attitudes, culture, ideas, and activism also matter to the fate of welfare services, alongside administration or finances. Fighting for Life is up-to-date, with a good account of the disastrous Covid years, and it describes well the slow downgrading, over time, of what the NHS is deemed to offer, a shift punctuated by bursts of new ideas during the Blair years and in the Lansley reforms – most of which wound up in a healthcare scrapyard somewhere in middle England. Hardman is suitably cynical of election promises: more nurses, more doctors, more GPs and better mental-health services. Just watch how the current health minister, Steve Barclay, recently wriggled to get out of the “40 new hospitals” promise. Information Analyst: Polly Russell, Information Analyst, Karen Gronkowski, Senior Information Analyst and Aidan Morrison, Senior Information Analyst, SONNAR Programme, ARHAI Scotland

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In this wide-ranging history, Andrew Seaton examines the full story of the NHS. He traces how the service has changed and adapted, bringing together the experiences of patients, staff from Britain and abroad, and the service’s wider supporters and opponents. He explains not only why it survived the neoliberalism of the late twentieth century but also how it became a key marker of national identity. Seaton emphasizes the resilience of the NHS—perpetually “in crisis” and yet perennially enduring—as well as the political values it embodies and the work of those who have tirelessly kept it afloat.

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. On 5 July, the NHS will celebrate its 75th anniversary. To coincide, a special series of programming across the BBC spanning BBC Radio 4, BBC News and Radio 5 Live will take the temperature of the national health service to consider what the future might look like for the NHS’s huge workforce and the patients who rely on it. An engaging, inclusive history of the NHS, exploring its surprising survival-and the people who have kept it runningFluidly written, richly detailed and frequently surprising, Our NHSis the portrait of a social democratic institution that withstood the assaults of neoliberalism, battle-scarred and transformed but still very much alive”. I trained both in the U.K. and the U.S., holding a Ph.D in History from New York University (NYU), an MA in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine from King’s College London, and a BA in History from the University of Oxford. An engaging, inclusive history of the NHS, exploring its surprising survival—and the people who have kept it running.