The creation of the health service changed Britain. Yet while this vision is under severe threat, it has also never been more keenly cherished
In writing To Provide All People, I hoped to create a lyrical bridge between the birth of the most radical and beautiful idea we’ve ever made manifest and the people who embody that idea today: the staff and patients of the National Health Service. Moving between the story of its coming into being in 1948 and personal experiences of the service today, my aspiration was to paint a philosophical and emotional map of our NHS rather than a journalistic or political survey. I wanted to excavate what the idea of healthcare free at the point of delivery means for us as individuals and as a society. What are the patterns of psychological resonance of such a national act of compassion and how has the ethos of the idea informed and formed us, as individuals and as a country?
Related: Life as an NHS nurse in the 1950s: ‘Patients never had to wait on trolleys’
To talk with these patients was also to be reminded of what Bevan called the service’s 'secret, silent column'
Related: Life as an NHS nurse in the 1940s: ‘You have to forget about yourself’
Nurses are the most vital connective tissue that binds the grand scale of the NHS’s philosophy with the intimacy of its practice
Related: Life as an NHS nurse in the 1990s: ‘Patient expectation has risen’
Continue reading...
