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

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She doesn’t let her admiration for the NHS as both a political achievement and a healthcare provider impede the exposition of its flaws. This work is a wide-ranging history of the British coal industry in the twentieth century, exploring its legacies on human health, pollution, decolonisation, political economy, and environmentalism. A rising tide of liberalising capitalism has sluiced the NHS but somehow not dissolved its collectivist foundations. Environmental History and New Directions in Modern British Historiography', Twentieth Century British History 30, no.

Britain’s National Health Service remains a cultural icon—a symbol of excellent, egalitarian care since its founding more than seven decades ago. An engaging, inclusive history of the NHS, exploring its surprising survival-and the people who have kept it running In recent decades, a wave of appreciation for the NHS has swept across the UK. At the next general election, Keir Starmer will, as usual, warn the country not to trust the Tories with the NHS. The resultant danger is that “patients are starting to lose faith with it in an unprecedented way, too”. As part of the book’s conclusion, I also offered some reflections on what the history of the NHS might mean in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.Instead, the book shows the active work that was required to embed and adapt the service to social change, outmanoeuvre free-market critics, and associated the institution with Britishness itself. How Britain fell in love with socialised medicine, and whether the relationship can endure, is the subject of two books published to coincide with the service’s 75th birthday. Our NHS is an engaging, inclusive history of the NHS, exploring its surprising survival and the people who have kept it running . Our NHSinsists that neither the institution’s acclaim nor its survival were automatic or pre-ordained. If social democratic politics endured through the health service (which remained free-at-the-point-of-use, universal, mainly funded by taxation, and government-coordinated) then it lay fractured elsewhere.

As a first-generation university student from a low-income background, Andrew is an advocate of widening access to education, and has volunteered with programming to encourage students from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue higher education. He and Hardman are in agreement on the vital role that immigration has played in keeping the health service functioning. From Clement Attlee to ‘Clap for Carers,’ this is a nuanced account of both the evolution of the NHS and the myth-making that came with it, as Seaton navigates the history of what is at once ‘Britain’s best-loved institution’ and a service perpetually seen to be in crisis. Yet its success was hardly guaranteed, as Andrew Seaton makes clear in this elegantly written, highly original history of an institution that survived numerous crises to become a model for the democratic welfare state and the very antithesis of the health inequities we face today as Americans. Dr Seaton will also appear on Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’ on Monday 3 rd July speaking about the NHS for its 75 th anniversary (5 th July).After all, it was not inevitable at the service’s inception in 1948 that it would one day regularly top opinion polls of what made people ‘most proud to be British’. 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. The wide lens and varied material that underpins the book allowed me to answer two central questions. Seaton emphasizes the resilience of the NHS-perpetually "in crisis" and yet perennially enduring-as well as the political values it embodies and the work of those who have tirelessly kept it afloat.

Both are nuanced in mapping the contours of a public response that shades between welcoming foreign doctors and nurses, wary acceptance and flagrant racism.Andrew Seaton’s book was first published in the summer of 2023, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the founding of the NHS. Britons have clapped for frontline workers and championed the service as a distinctive national achievement. Seaton’s] analysis is sharp and compelling and makes a considerable contribution to the scholarship surrounding what he terms ‘Britain’s best-loved institution. From the publisher: “In this wide-ranging history, Andrew Seaton examines the full story of the NHS. Unfortunately we cannot offer a refund on custom prints unless they are faulty or we have made a mistake.