ON JULY 5th 1948 Sylvia Beckingham was admitted to Park Hospital in Greater Manchester. The 13-year-old was the inaugural patient of the National Health Service (NHS), the world’s first universal health system free at the point of use. At her bedside Aneurin Bevan, the health secretary, called the NHS the most civilised step any country had ever taken.
Elsewhere patients lined up at clinics with horrendous coughs, festering wounds and hernias spilling into trusses. Pregnant women queued, too; one in 350 mothers were dying in childbirth, about the same as in Gabon today. Bevan assumed that demand would eventually moderate. It did not. “We never shall have all we need,” he soon realised. “Expectation will always exceed capacity.”
Call it Bevan’s law. Seven decades on it is still true. In a speech on June 18th to mark the NHS’s 70th birthday, Theresa May acknowledged that rising demand and years of low growth in funding had put the service “under strain”. Promising that...Continue reading
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