Review

A scrapbook of the NHS

HEADLINE HEALTH: a Health Service Journal history of the NHS
Wendy Moore & Georgina Bryon (eds)
Emap Healthcare, 1998, £13.99

Last year’s fiftieth anniversary of the NHS provided the Health Service Journal, that respected weekly chronicle of events in NHS policy and management, with a good reason to look back at its coverage of health service ups and downs since 1948.

The result, Headline Health, is rather like an evening spent flicking through the family photo album: didn’t Rodney Bickerstaff look young in 1981, do you remember that Wendy Savage demo we went on, and didn’t nurses have funny hairstyles in 1973?

While there are hours of fascinated amusement to be had, distilling insights from the varied history presented here is a much trickier matter. Whether this is inevitable given the breadth of subjects included, or a result of the format of clippings with minimal commentary attached, I am not sure.

Of course, because all the reporting in the volume originated in the Journal, the principal preoccupations are the usual managerial ones of financial, administrative structure, beds, patient stays and staff pay. Interestingly, debate in the earliest years of the NHS was dominated, as now, by arguments about the adequacy of funding, the best way to organise the service and the inevitability, or otherwise, of rationing.

In some ways the most stimulating period of health service history for this reviewer was the lived through but only half-remembered madness of the Thatcherite 1980s in which it seemed that the NHS might be dismantled any day, and without notice. Although some characters and events from that period are now almost entirely forgotten—does anyone remember John Moore?—others, such as the Griffiths reforms, the arrival of Aids and the unexpected (even to ministers) announcement of the NHS review 1988 have entered folklore. In either case, there is plenty to be learned from looking back at the reports of the time. Overall, this collection does better as a resource for those who already know something, than as a starting point.