National Health Service: 75th Anniversary

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Thursday 30th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I declare all my interests as listed in the register, including having worked throughout my life in the NHS. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, both on securing this debate and, more so, on all the work he has done in his many years of service to the health of this nation.

Perhaps we should have called this debate “In Place of Fear”, the title of Bevans’s own short book. As Gordon Brown said:

“The astonishing fact is that Bevan’s vision has stood both the test of time and the test of change unimaginable in his day. At the centre of his vision was a National Health Service … a uniquely powerful engine of social justice”.


To know where you are going, you must know where you have come from. Bevan had seen directly how the mother in the average family suffers when there is an absence of a free health service and how financial distress excludes those with the greatest need from accessing even minimal care. Yet poverty still blights our health and care, particularly when serious illness hits and the main carer in the household is a child or young person. According to Bevan:

“The collective principle asserts that the resources of medical skill and the apparatus of healing shall be placed at the disposal of the patient, without charge, when he or she needs them; that medical treatment and care should be a communal responsibility; that they should be made available to rich and poor alike in accordance with medical need and by no other criteria”.


Seventy-five years ago, so many physically and mentally wounded were returning from war, penicillin had only just become available and, compared to today, there were relatively few interventions in medicine. The concepts of evaluating the efficacy of clinical audit and the frontiers of medical research that have revolutionised practice were just a dream for many. People now want to be cared for and know that they will get better care in research-active services.

My mother-in-law, as a young GP, gave penicillin injections to a critically ill woman with pneumonia; the response was miraculous. This recovered patient gave her a teapot as a wedding present, and we still have the “penicillin teapot” in the family today. Yet now we face huge threats of antimicrobial resistance, as these precious resources have been misused. Over-the-counter sales of antibiotics in some countries and their use in animal husbandry are threatening our survival from life-threatening infections. Drug-resistant TB is now a major threat.

Some of our failure to value adequately the importance of health to the country’s economy has resulted in too little effort being put into health promotion and public health, as others have said. Yet amazing advances have been made. The polio of my childhood has almost been consigned to history, diphtheria is rarely seen here, and other vaccines have transformed disease incidence, from measles to carcinogenic HPV, and many more. Yet we still see Dr Julian Hart’s inverse care law in play, that the availability of good medical or social care tends to vary inversely with the need of the population served.

With so much more that is treatable, and with social problems creating more avoidable disorders, we must tackle the social determinants of health if we are even to begin to tackle growing waiting lists. The NHS cannot be the final repository for all that is going wrong in society. Our collective responsibility is through care and well-being in communities, better nutrition, and through supporting people to look after their own health and to respect a health service that is not simply a demand service—it is not like online shopping.

As we push for more care in the community as people are moved out of hospital, we have to remember that the local family structure that previous generations depended on is just not there. Discharging people from hospital to loneliness does not aid recovery. Does the Minister acknowledge and value the excellent work undertaken by all those in the community, particularly district nurses and care staff, and the ever-increasing pressure on them?

We need to tackle public health more than ever, and the misinformation that blights its use and interventions. Prevention runs through everything, including preventing complications and care failures. Nye Bevan recognised that it is obviously preferable to prevent suffering than to alleviate it. We often know what to do but are just not doing it. We understand analgesics yet too few people with advanced disease are accessing the expertise they need, including in my own discipline—I declare an interest in specialist palliative care.

Our emergency departments are under such pressure that staff talk of leaving as we hit a downward spiral in access for those with greatest need. Disease does not respect the clock or the calendar. If we do not use our resources better—the greatest resource being our staff—we will never tackle increasing waits.

We live in a seven-day society so we need to make it easier for staff with children to work on different rotas, use term-time flexible hours and weekend childcare resources so that we can use our theatres with high-intensity teams, and use diagnostic scanners and so on much more efficiently. These are human resource issues. Staff at every level can care only if they feel cared for, supported in difficult decisions and valued for all they do, with meals available, on-call rooms, and private areas to have private conversations. Without the tools and the space they need to treat people and care for people, we cannot expect them to do well.

There are many apparently high-cost interventions now available that result in remarkable long-term savings. Failure to invest in these is short-termism at its worst. Investing in capital and training, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, said, is essential. We need to rethink our health economics model to ensure that we meet need, in the short and long term. There are different ways of working. Technology can help but it is not the only answer to current issues. A healthy nation is a productive nation.