NHS in photos: Looking back on 70 years of our health service

As the NHS approaches its 70th anniversary, Hannah McKay and Estelle Shirbon meet the patients and staff who believe its core values are just important today as they were in 1948

Donald Riston, 83, remembers what healthcare was like before the service was founded and says: ‘We could never go back to that sort of system’ (Reuters)

Free, good quality healthcare for everyone, from cradle to grave. That was the mission of Britain’s National Health Service when it was founded on 5 July 1948.

Ask any patient, nurse or doctor in the sprawling Milton Keynes University Hospital in central England how they feel about the NHS now and you will find that those core values are just as important today as they were 70 years ago.

“I’ve had so many things go wrong with my body in the last four-and-a-half years that it’s just incredible that one organisation can cure so many things and treat me so kindly, efficiently, and for free. It’s just astonishing,” says 83-year-old Donald Ritson, who was receiving treatment in the hospital’s ward 24, a 20-bed surgical unit.

Ritson remembers what it was like before the state-funded NHS, when healthcare was beyond the reach of many people because they could not afford to pay doctors’ fees.

“I can remember my brother being ill and my parents being unable to afford to go to a doctor, so they tried to treat it themselves,” he recalls.

“We could never go back to that sort of system. Cradle to grave, it’s not a bad idea.”

A former minister once wrote that the NHS is the closest thing the English have to a religion, and that often-repeated quote still rings true. It is a political sacred cow, with rival parties competing to show their support and to try to convince the public it is safe in their hands.

But as much as Britons love the NHS, they also fret about it. Can it survive in its present form, delivering care for free to anyone who needs it, in the face of ever-increasing pressures from an ageing population? That is a perennial topic of debate.

A nurse takes blood from a patient (Reuters) (Reuters/Hannah McKay)

“Yes, I do worry about it. There’s not enough funding and staffing to go around already, and people are having more and more care and they’re living longer,” says 29-year-old Sarah Plant, who was in the A&E department with her elderly grandmother Barbara, who had been taken ill.

Plant, who has the rare and debilitating Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, is a frequent user of the NHS. As are her children. She says she has noticed the pressures getting worse over the years, for example waiting times for certain tests have increased.

“I’ve had some bad experiences. I think everyone has,” she says.

But Plant is in no doubt about what she and her family owe to the NHS.

“It’s kept a lot of us alive,” she says. “They’ve brought me back twice. I wouldn’t be here without them.

“If we’d had to pay for the care, we wouldn’t have been able to afford it. I don’t really want to think about what it would have been like.”

Wayne Vassell, a junior doctor specialising in orthopaedics, said the ideals underpinning the NHS were important to him as someone from a modest background, the first in his family to go to university.

In the physiotherapy department, amputees take a class (Reuters) (Reuters/Hannah McKay)

“For me the NHS means a lot because it’s a unique model that provides care to people irrespective of background and income,” he says, answering questions from Reuters during a break.

Vassell says he does not expect the pressures on the NHS to ease off anytime soon. He sees the service as “structurally more pressured” than in the past, due to the ageing population and the competing demands on state funding, at a time when other public services have been hit hard by austerity measures.

But far from being put off by those pressures, he says he regards them as a challenge worth rising to.

“The best reward is when you’ve been treating a patient and you have a happy family and they say thank you,” he says.

Joe Harrison, the hospital’s chief executive, is upbeat about the long-term future of the NHS. He expects the core principle of free care available for all to remain in place because there is simply no political will to change it.

“I have total confidence that we will be here in another 70 years,” he says.

Reuters