A national health service : the White Paper proposals in brief.

Date:
1944
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A national health service : the White Paper proposals in brief. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    I SCOPE OF A NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE What the new service must offer The new service is designed to provide, for everyone who wishes to use it, a full range of health care. No one-will be compelled to use it. Those who prefer to make their own arrangements for medical attention must be free to do so. But to all who use the service it must offer, as and when required, the care of a family doctor, the skill of a consultant, laboratory services, treatment in hospital, the advice and treatment available in specialised clinics (maternity and child welfare centres, tuberculosis dispensaries and the like), dental and ophthalmic treatment, drugs and surgical appliances, midwifery, home nursing © and all other services essential to health. Moreover, all these branches of medical care must be so planned and related to one another that everyone who uses the new service is assured of ready access to whichever of its branches he er she needs. . The new health service in all its branches will be free to all, apart from possible charges where certain appliances are provided. Questions of the disability benefits payable during sickness at home or during — periods of free maintenance in hospital are matters for the Government’s later proposals on social insurance. Deficiencies in the existing services A great deal of what is required is already provided in one or other of the existing health services. The problem of creating a National Health Service is not that of destroying services that are obsolete and bad and starting afresh, but of building on foundations laid by much hard work over many years and making better what is already good. 3 a2 | Yet there are many gaps in the existing services and much expansion and reorganisation are necessary to weld them into a comprehensive National Service. Despite the progress made it is far from true that everyone can get ail the kinds of medical service which he requires. Nor is the care of health wholly divorced from ability to pay for it. To take one very important example, the first requirement is a personal or family doctor, available for consultation-on all problems. The — National Health Insurance scheme makes this provision for a large number of people, but not for wives or children or dependants—and it does not normally afford the consultant and specialist services which the general practitioner needs behind him. For extreme need, the Poor Law still exists. For particular groups, there are other facilities. But for something like half the population, the first-line service of a personal medical adviser depends on private arrangements. | So, too, in the hospital services, despite the well-known achieve- ments of the voluntary hospital movement and more recently of the publicly provided hospitals of the local authorities, it is not yet true — that everyone can be sure of the right hospital and specialist facilities which he needs, when he needs them. zs
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