70 years of fighting the 5 giants – lessons from the front line

In the year that celebrates the 70th anniversary of the ‘national treasure’ that is the National Health Service, this meeting of the Manchester Medical Society is more than timely. The origins of the NHS are rooted in the fight for social justice which runs not only in Manchester, Liverpool and the NorthWest but across the industrial and commercial north of the country. Next year here in Manchester, we will be commemorating the bi-centenary of the Peterloo Massacre in which 15 people, including one John Ashton, protesting about the poor social conditions and lack of suffrage, were slaughtered in a cavalry charge. This was a defining moment in the development of our democracy, the extension of suffrage and in due course to the extension of public services for the whole population. On 5 July 1948, Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health and midwife of the NHS inaugurated its first hospital, The Park, in Davyhulme in Trafford; and today, as we speak, former Health Minister and now elected Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham is leading the charge for devolution and integration in partnership with the borough councils of this major conurbation. Along the M62 in Liverpool, William Henry Duncan, the country’s first full-time Medical Officer of Health pioneered a dynamic Victorian town hall based public health movement. His work has in recent years inspired a renaissance of public health going far beyond this region, a renaissance of importance when we come to looking at what the future holds in the next 70 years, not least with the long overdue move to devolution of government in arguably the most centralised country in Europe. This talk will be in two parts. In the first, I will draw on my recent Lancet article of Nicholas Timmins’ formidable review of the first 70 years of the NHS to set the scene and identify some key challenges [1]. These challenges must be addressed if our grandchildren are to be able to benefit from the NHS and the Welfare State in their later years. In the second part, I will lay out my own conclusions based on a lifetime within the NHS and my experiences of trying to ensure that a balanced approach to prevention, treatment and care underpin the pursuit of social justice within a whole systems set of arrangements and characterised by visionary local leadership. On 1 December 1942, queues stretched from his Majesty’s Stationery Office along High Holborn in London. By lunchtime all copies of Sir William Beveridge’s ground breaking report, Social Insurance and Allied Services [Cmnd 6404] had been sold. It was much the same story elsewhere. In Liverpool, my father secured the two volume report that today takes pride of place in my study. Beveridge’s report sits alongside work by others who have guided me in my career: Brian Abel Smith, Douglas Black, Ann Cartwright, Karen Dunnell, Margot Jeffries, Jerry Morris, Richard Titmuss, Peter Townsend and many others associated with the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In the introduction to his report, Beveridge enunciated three principles that provided a framework for all that was to follow. First, in supporting the importance of learning from past experience, he spelled out that sectional interests (of doctors), should not be allowed to stand in the way of what was ‘a revolutionary moment in world history....a time for revolutions, not for patching’. Second, he was clear that social insurance – the focus of his terms of reference from Prime Minister Winston Churchill – was only one part of a comprehensive policy of social progress, before going on to declaim his most famous and Bunyonesque passage: