An unhappy birthday

When Nye Bevan launched the NHS on 5 July 1948, most of the British population could not expect to celebrate a 70th birthday. Life expectancy at birth for men was 66 and for women 71. That this has since grown to 79.1 years and 82.8 years respectively is in part — though far from entirely — thanks to the NHS.

Many insist that Bevan’s description of the service as the ‘envy of the world’ remains true. For Lord Lawson, a former editor of this magazine, the NHS is ‘the closest thing the English people have to a religion’ — an assertion confirmed during the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, when NHS nurses jumped joyfully up and down on old-fashioned hospital beds. Moreover, public affection for the NHS seems impervious to scandals such as Mid Staffs and, as revealed last week, a fatal policy of over-prescribing opioids at Gosport Memorial Hospital.

Yet the accolades awarded to the NHS are only half-deserved. The principle that underpinned its foundation — that healthcare should be available to everyone, equally, regardless of the means to pay — is rightly valued. No one wants to go back to the days when parents would avoid taking sick children to see a doctor for fear of being unable to pay the bill. But when it comes to the quality of care, the NHS does not fare so well. A joint report this week by the Health Foundation, the IFS, the King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust puts it bluntly: ‘The UK appears to perform less well than similar countries on the overall rate at which people die when successful medical care could have saved their lives.’

While the NHS is good at managing some conditions such as diabetes, the UK’s mortality rate from cancer, heart disease and strokes compares very poorly with that of other developed countries.