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

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That is especially true for women and children, who had previously depended on the indulgence of husbands and fathers for access to medicine.

Although these interpretations still carried some weight in my thinking, I tried to not let them determine my analysis. Britons have clapped for frontline workers and championed the service as a distinctive national achievement. Against the Sacred Cow': NHS Opposition and the Fellowship for Freedom in Medicine', Twentieth Century British History 26, no. In this blogpost, part of the 50 Years in 50 Books series for our 50th Anniversary, Andrew Seaton gives us an insight into how he went about writing a history of one of Britain’s best-loved institutions. On the other hand, as many public health experts observed, the disproportionate mortality rates from Covid-19 among working-class communities and people from ethnic and racial minority backgrounds underlined the longer-term health inequalities in Britain.In Our NHS, Andrew Seaton explores how the National Health Service, a great achievement for Aneurin Bevan and the left, became a national institution commanding widespread support. The two authors are aligned in their analysis, covering much of the same material and identifying many of the same recurrent patterns: the constant pressure for innovation provoking fear of core NHS principles being abandoned; tension between a consumer culture that increasingly expects customised choice and a system that functions by pooling resources on a principle of collective solidarity; the challenge of imposing minimum standards without the perverse, unintended consequences that rigid targets generate; the simple fact that there is never enough money, but also that more cash is not always the answer and Treasury pockets are not infinitely deep. From the publisher: “In this wide-ranging history, Andrew Seaton examines the full story of the NHS.

Inspection copies are books under consideration as required or recommended reading for an upcoming course. It is explicit in his conclusion – that the tenacity of the NHS in fending off marketisation might serve as a model for the resurgence of egalitarian, social democratic politics in Britain. Fluidly written, richly detailed and frequently surprising, Our NHS is the portrait of a social democratic institution that withstood the assaults of neoliberalism, battle-scarred and transformed but still very much alive.On one hand, the service had survived and it was able to perform functions such as distributing vaccines with a high degree of public trust. In Fighting for Life, Isabel Hardman arranges the history into 12 themes, defined as the “battles that made our NHS”. The wide lens and varied material that underpins the book allowed me to answer two central questions.