Launch of the National Health Service

On 5 July 1948 Aneurin Bevan took the keys of Park Hospital, near Manchester, from Lancashire County Council. The hospital had been built by the Barton-upon-Irwell Union, a body set up in 1849 to provide for the area's poor, and first took patients in December 1928; during the war it served the British forces and then the US Army. That day it became the first hospital of the National Health Service. Its first NHS patient was Sylvia Diggory, aged 13.

The plan traced back to the Beveridge Report, published on 2 December 1942, which named five giants to be fought, Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness, and sold widely at home and abroad for two shillings. The National Health Service Act received Royal Assent on 6 November 1946.

Doctors nearly stopped it. Six months before the appointed day, the historian Pauline Gregg later wrote, the whole structure looked likely to collapse for lack of support from the medical profession. The profession's bodies resisted until a near-last-minute agreement, reached after months in which Bevan gave assurances on clinical freedom. By July 1948 a majority of general practitioners had applied to join.

In England and Wales alone the new service took over 1,143 voluntary hospitals with 90,000 beds and 1,545 municipal hospitals with 390,000 beds. It covered hospital care, ambulances, general practitioners, maternity care, prescriptions, optical care and dentistry. Britain was the first Western country to offer medical care free at the point of use to its whole population. Charges for dental and optical care came in 1951 under the Attlee government, and prescription charges followed under Churchill's government the next year.