[EQ] UK - The NHS at 60: Perspectives in Health Care Systems

From: David McDaid, LSE Health and Social Care
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008

NHS at 60: Perspectives on Health Care Systems

Social History of Medicine - Volume 21, Number 3, December 2008   

The British National Health Service 1948-2008: A Review of the Historiography
Martin Gorsky, Centre for History in Public Health, Department of Public Health and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London
Soc Hist Med 2008 21: 437-460; doi:10.1093/shm/hkn064. Open Access

http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/3/437?etoc

“….This article surveys historical writing on the British National Health Service since its inception in 1948. Its main focus is on policy-making and organisation and its principal concerns are primary care and the hospital sector, although public health, and psychiatric and geriatric care are briefly discussed…”

History and Health Policy in the United States: The Making of a Health Care Industry, 1948-2008
Rosemary A. Stevens, Weill Cornell Medical College, Department of Psychiatry, New York
Soc Hist Med 2008 21: 461-483; doi:10.1093/shm/hkn063. [Subscription required]

http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/3/461?etoc

“…….This article considers the history of American health care over the past 60 years, reflecting the diverse ways in which health care is embedded in the economy, politics, power structures and culture of the United States and discussing what it is like to have a health care industry without having a national health service or universal health insurance.
The article concludes that, since the Second World War, the United States has been successful in achieving highly specialized, valued, life-improving health care for most—not for all—members of the population, but at a huge and rising cost. Notable achievements have been produced by the public–private mix of the American health enterprise. However, broad questions of social class, illness, insurance and the burden of payment for health care remain in a society with widening divisions of the population by socio-economic class, education, health literacy and computer skills….”

'Vision and Vested Interests': National Health Service Reform in South Africa and Britain during the 1940s and Beyond
Anne Digby, Centre for Health, Medicine and Society, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane, Oxford
Soc Hist Med 2008 21: 485-502; doi:10.1093/shm/hkn061. [Subscription required]

http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/3/485?etoc

A National Health Service, By Comparison
Richard Freeman, Politics and International Relations, School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh
Soc Hist Med 2008 21: 503-520; doi:10.1093/shm/hkn065. [Subscription required]

http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/3/503?etoc

“….The National Health Service (NHS) has always been compared to other things, to other organisations and systems both at home and abroad. This paper explores those comparisons, beginning with the origins of national public health care in Lloyd George's study of German social insurance, and ending with Gordon Brown's claims for the NHS as ‘the best insurance policy in the world’. It considers the comparisons and contrasts made for and with the NHS at the time of its foundation and the comparison of state and market around 1990, before reviewing the contemporary function of comparison as form and basis of health governance. The paper presents three related patterns of thought: one prompted by encounter with the other, one sustained by metaphor and one developed in more formal, analytic comparison. It concludes by discussing why comparison itself is such a dangerous and contested thing….”.

 

 

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