National Health Service

The National Health Service (NHS) is the name of the public health services of England, Scotland and Wales, and is commonly used to refer to those of Northern Ireland. They were established together as one of the major social reforms following the Second World War on the founding principles of being comprehensive, universal and free at the point of delivery. Today, each provides a comprehensive range of health services, the vast majority of which are free for people ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom.

Taken together, the four National Health Services in 2015-16 employed around 1.6 million people with a combined budget of £136.7 billion. UK residents are not charged for most medical treatment, with exceptions such as a fixed charge for prescriptions; dental treatment is administered differently, with standard charges for most procedures. For non-residents, the NHS is free at the time of use, for general practitioner (GP) and emergency treatment not including admission to hospital.

The NHS began on the 'Appointed Day' of 5 July 1948. This put into practice Westminster legislation for England and Wales from 1946 and Scotland from 1947, and the Northern Ireland Parliament's 1947 Public Health Services Act. Calls for a "unified medical service" can be dated back to the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law in 1909, but it was following the 1942 Beveridge Report's recommendation to create "comprehensive health and rehabilitation services for prevention and cure of disease" that cross-party consensus emerged on introducing a National Health Service of some description. When Clement Attlee's Labour Party won the 1945 election he appointed Aneurin Bevan as Health Minister. Bevan then embarked upon what the official historian of the NHS, Charles Webster, called an "audacious campaign" to take charge of the form the NHS finally took.

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