Did we really want a National Health Service in Britain? Voluntary Hospital Provision before 1948.

Popular Opinion and Patients’ Views on Existing Voluntary Hospital Provision before 1948. The official history of the NHS, in justifying the case for radical reform in 1948, listed amongst other key factors, the ‘overwhelming public pressure’ for a nationalised, universal hospital system, fuelled by rising patient expectations and a popular discontent with voluntary provision. Yet we know surprising little about what patients actually thought about the existing hospital system, and the treatments they received in it. In this paper, Nick Hayes evaluates the views of ‘ordinary’ people, and not those of the doctors, politicians or civil servants that so dominate the official record. What, for example, did people think of state medicine or voluntary hospitals? What did they grumble about, what did they value, what did they fear? He argues that in a majority of cases satisfaction levels with existing hospital provision were high, and compared favourably with those recorded after 1948. Yet this, of course, is not how we remember this part of our national story.