{"id":26581,"date":"2023-07-04T18:04:39","date_gmt":"2023-07-04T16:04:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.historyextra.com\/?p=235221"},"modified":"2023-07-05T11:11:40","modified_gmt":"2023-07-05T09:11:40","slug":"was-there-ever-a-golden-age-of-the-nhs","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/rss_feed\/was-there-ever-a-golden-age-of-the-nhs\/","title":{"rendered":"Was there ever a golden age of the NHS?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr Andrew Seaton of the University of Oxford considers the question of a ‘golden era’ of Britain’s National Health Service, founded in 1948\u2026 <\/p>

By Dr Andrew Seaton\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Tuesday, 04 July 2023 at 12:00 am<\/p>

\n\n

\u201cThis is an important question, because it frames and underpins our idea of crisis and decline,\u201d says Dr Andrew Seaton. \u201cThis idea that there was a golden age for the NHS<\/a>, and that now we\u2019re no longer in a golden age. So history is very important to our present understandings of \u2018decline and crisis\u2019, these kinds of phrases that are used around the NHS.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was no such thing as a golden age for the NHS. Often what you\u2019ll see, particularly from the [political] left, is the postwar decades presented as a golden era of the welfare state: the supposed generosity of Clement Attlee<\/a>\u2019s government and their support for welfare services, the supposed golden era of harmony on the wards, respect for the matron, this kind of stuff. It\u2019s just not true. It\u2019s a fantasy. If we look at funding levels, the Attlee governments actually spent more money on imperial commitments and overseas military commitments than they did [on] the welfare state. That\u2019s the first point to make. There were social divisions on the wards, too. It wasn\u2019t that everyone had respect for matrons in the past. [And] if you were a woman or a working-class person or someone who wasn\u2019t white, you might be condescended to [for instance]. These kind of social cleavages existed in the postwar years.<\/p>\n

\""Clement\"<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>
the welfare state,\u201d says Dr Andrew Seaton. (Image by Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\u201cSo I suppose in that sense, if we\u2019re thinking about golden eras or high-water marks for the NHS, it really depends what we\u2019re thinking about here. If we\u2019re thinking about funding, then the most generous point is under New Labour in the late 1990s and during the 2000s. That is the point when the UK, for the first time in the postwar era, came up to the level of its international industrialised peers in terms of spending on healthcare. So it depends what lens we\u2019re looking [through].\n

\u201cAnd I would argue that it isn\u2019t necessarily in the deep, deep past that we could find the high-water marks of the NHS. It could be surprisingly recent. In 2010, 2011 and maybe even 2012, the Commonwealth Foundation (which is an independent health care think tank based in New York) put the NHS as the number-one healthcare system in terms of efficiency and giving the most access to patients. So it\u2019s in the surprisingly recent past that it was achieving those kinds of metrics.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is all to say that it\u2019s not impossible that it might achieve those kinds of metrics again in the future. And, of course, for very, very good reasons, there\u2019s a lot of concern and pessimism about the state of the NHS. But I think if we think historically about it \u2013 and we don\u2019t even have to go that far back in the past \u2013 we can challenge and maybe even puncture some of that sentiment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr Andrew Seaton was talking to Matt Elton on the HistoryExtra<\/em> podcast<\/a>. Read and hear more about the history of the NHS<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n

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