This article is part of a series celebrating the NHS’s 70th Anniversary, sponsored by Philips. Find out more about Philips’ solutions here.
It is a mark of how far medicine has come that Sylvia Diggory, the 13-year-old patient visited by Nye Bevan on the first day of the NHS on 5 July 1948, may not have needed a health service bed at all had she fallen ill today. Diggory had been in hospital for several weeks before Bevan’s visit and would remain there a few weeks more before happily making a full recovery. Yet nowadays, according to Great Ormond Street Hospital, most cases do not require a hospital admission. They can be treated through observation.
The NHS bears little relation to the one which existed in 1948 — other than the cherished principle of treatment for everyone, regardless of means, which remains. There are whole areas of treatment, routine today, which did not exist in 1948.
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