Labour Party leader and now Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to reduce NHS waiting lists (Picture: PA)
Labour leader Keir Starmer has officially become Britain’s new Prime Minister after the Conservative Party suffered its worst ever defeat in a General Election – all this on the NHS’s 76th birthday, no less.
In his first address as the new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer promised to get ‘our NHS back on its feet facing the future’.
The UK’s beloved NHS became a key battleground in the lead up to the election, with healthcare a priority for many voters.
Improving waiting times, recruiting more nurses and GPs, and improving mental health services were at the heart of most political parties’ campaigns.
The winning Labour Party manifesto set out plans to cut NHS waiting times with 40,000 more appointments every week, double the number of cancer scanners, and recruit 8,500 additional mental health staff to improve support.
How did Britain and the NHS get here?
Though considered a symbol of national pride, promising universal health care for all, the NHS has not been without turmoil under the outgoing Conservative government.
Junior doctors have been locked into a bitter row about workload, conditions and pay, resulting in 11 rounds of strikes over 20 months.
Medics in training have said their pay has been cut by more than a quarter over the last 15 years and have called for a 35% increase.
In the lead up to the Brexit referendum, the NHS became a focus of the Vote Leave campaign
The massive Brexit bus from Vote Leave’s campaign in 2016, claiming that the UK was sending £350m a week to the EU and alluding that money should be spent on the NHS instead is now imprinted on everyone’s mind. Alas, our health service has yet to see that funding.
Businessman Marcus Ball went as far as taking legal action over the claim, though former PM Boris Johnson avoided criminal prosecution.
In 2020 the NHS took centerstage once again. This time people clapped every night for the exhausted, yet heroic staff caring for our most vulnerable amid uncertainty and fear of a new disease.
Four years on, Keir Starmer’s new government has a lot to get done.
The NHS was roundly praised during the Covid-19 pandemic, which many healthcare professionals described as one of the toughest periods in its history. (Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
When was the NHS founded?
The NHS was founded on July 5, 1948, by Aneurin Bevan, making the UK’s beloved health service 76 years old in 2024.
It was launched at Park Hospital in Manchester, which is today known as Trafford General Hospital.
Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan was a Labour Party Politician and one of the most prominent post-war Labour ministers. He is widely viewed as the ‘father’ of the National Health Service.
Bevan was born on 15 November 1897 in Tredegar to a coal miner and grew up in a working-class community.
Aneurin Bevan pictured in August 1945(Picture: J. Wilds/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health, meeting a patient at Papworth Village Hospital that was taken over by the NHS (Picture: Edward G Malindine/Getty Images)
He left school at 13 and worked as a miner himself during his teenage years, which is when he became involved in trade unions.
He later won a scholarship to study in London where he attended Central Labour College.
In 1929 he was elected as the Labour MP for Ebbw Vale, and was a vocal critic of Churchill’s Conservative government during the Second World War.
After the war, he took the post of the Minister of Health in Clement Attlee’s Labour government where he led the establishment of the National Health Service.
Aneurin Bevan watching a demonstration of a new stretcher in Preston, on the first day of the new NHS(Picture: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Why was the NHS created?
The central principle of the NHS was to provide a health service that was available to all, free at point-of-need. The provision of NHS assistance should be based on clinical need, not on the individual’s ability to pay.
The NHS Constitution for England states: ‘The NHS belongs to the people.’
‘It is there to improve our health and wellbeing, supporting us to keep mentally and physically well, to get better when we are ill and, when we cannot fully recover, to stay as well as we can to the end of our lives.’
Aneurin Bevan reviews the NHS public information campaign, 1948. Bevan, a prominent socialist and son of a miner, wanted to create a welfare state, supported by a universal health service available to all and for free. (Picture: Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)
‘It works at the limits of science – bringing the highest levels of human knowledge and skill to save lives and improve health. It touches our lives at times of basic human need, when care and compassion are what matter most.’
‘The NHS is founded on a common set of principles and values that bind together the communities and people it serves – patients and public – and the staff who work for it.’
History of the NHS in pictures
Nurses cradle the first babies to be born under the new National Health Service, 5th July 1948. Had they been born a day earlier, they would have cost their families one shilling and sixpence. War had badly damaged Britain’s hospitals – not one in London had escaped the bombing. At Paddington General, the legs of the cots in the maternity department stood in tins to discourage cockroaches. (Picture: PA Images /Alamy Stock Photo)
The nascent NHS suffered from a recruitment crisis and nurses were called to help from across the Commonwealth and Caribbean as the shortfall grew. This image shows a Nigerian nurse in Brook General Hospital, London, 1958 (Picture: George W. Hales/Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
In a pivotal moment in the history of women’s health, birth control pills became available without charge on the NHS in 1961, despite vocal concerns in parliament about spiralling costs. Initially only prescribed to married women, the Family Planning Act of 1967 allowed single women to access them too. Here a nurse checks contraceptive pills at British Drug Houses 1965. (Picture: Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)
The NHS provided X-ray departments within bigger health centres. With early diagnosis of tuberculosis, what used to be a death sentence became a manageable condition. X-rays were a vital diagnostic tool, instrumental in the fight against TB – which was responsible for around 25,000 deaths a year in Britain prior to 1948 (Picture: Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)
Britain’s first heart transplant patient Frederick West with nurses at the National Heart Hospital in London, 1968. It took a team of 18 doctors and nurses to carry out the procedure. West survived for just 46 days after receiving the donor heart. (Picture: Rolls Press/Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)
The first nine months of the NHS saw 4.5 million extractions and 33 million artificial teeth issued by the NHS. By the mid-1960s, 37 per cent of the population wore full dentures, compared to over half in 1948, and just 6 per cent today. (Picture: Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)
Patient being fitted for glasses at the Moorfields Eye Hospital in east London, 1950. Under the new NHS spectacles were initially free of charge. Production couldn’t keep up with demand, and there was soon a six-month waiting list for glasses. (Picture: TopFoto)
In the late 1980s the Conservative government began a process of outsourcing NHS services to private contractors. Health workers protest in Nottingham, 1989. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had declared, ‘The NHS is safe in our hands.’(Picture: Sydney O’Meara/Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
What’s next for the NHS now Labour is in power?
Sir Keir Starmer said in the Labour manifesto that ‘we must rebuild our country’ and at the heart of that objective are ‘five national missions’. Among those is ensuring ‘our NHS is once again at the cutting edge of healthcare’, he said.
Labour lists one of its ‘first steps for change’ as ‘cutting NHS waiting times’. It plans to do so by providing 40,000 more appointments each week during evenings and weekends, with a promise that patients won’t have to wait longer than 18 weeks to see a specialist from the point of referral.
Labour has pledged to improve technology and transform the NHS by introducing new CT and MRI scanners, computers, using AI, and overhauling the NHS app to put patients ‘in control of their own health to better manage their medicine, appointments, and health needs’.
Thousands of GPs will be trained to guarantee face-to-face appointments and ‘end the 8am scramble’.
Mental health is at the top of Labour’s priority list by recruiting 8,500 more workers to bring down waiting times and pave the way for earlier interventions for patients. New staff will also be specially trained to support people and reduce the number of lives lost to suicide.
A dentistry rescue plan and a new programme of reform to create a National Care Service to improve social care was also pledged.
Action will be taken on public health including making it illegal to buy cigarettes, banning vapes from being branded or advertised, tackling childhood obesity, banning advertising of junk food to children and stopping the sale of high-caffeine energy drinks to under-16s.
Will Labour manage to keep the promises? Only time will tell.
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