Freya Lewis, who was injured in the Manchester Arena concert attack, and Jenny Grant, the nurse who treated her, spoke at the service.<doc-sep>The boss of the NHS has lauded the service as an enduring “unifying ideal” for people across Britain, as politicians, staff and patients queued up to pay tribute to the health service on its 70th birthday. At a service of celebration at Westminster Abbey for 2,200 NHS staff, Simon Stevens, the NHS England chief executive, quoted the archbishop of Canterbury’s view that the NHS was “the most powerful and visible expression of our Christian heritage” because it “sprang out of a concern that the poor should be able to be treated as well as the rich”. Stevens said: “This has become a unifying ideal, across this nation and down the generations. A health service that belongs to us all. To those of all faiths and of none.” Martin Griffiths, a trauma surgeon who also spoke at the event, said: “The NHS is a grand lady who watches over us every day.” Freya Lewis, 15, who underwent 13 operations and more than 70 hours of surgery after being seriously injured in last year’s Manchester Arena bombing, recalled how staff at the city’s children’s hospital had helped her to walk again. “The NHS saved my life and got me back to normal. The NHS is the best thing in the world,” she said. Thousands of tea parties were held on Thursday to mark the 70th anniversary of the creation of the NHS on 5 July 1948 by Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government. Buildings including town halls, York Minster and Everton football club’s Goodison Park stadium were lit up in blue – the NHS’s colour – in celebration. Sophie, Countess of Wessex, represented the royal family at the abbey, where Attlee is buried. Jeremy Hunt, the health and social care secretary, and Philip Hammond, the chancellor, represented the government, which recently agreed to give the NHS in England a £20bn funding boost by 2023-24. Doctors, nurses and many other staff, some in uniform, and patients, some on crutches and others in wheelchairs, formed the congregation at the service. NHS staff pose for a selfie on their arrival at Westminster Abbey. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA In a message to guests in the order of service, Theresa May thanked “one of our nation’s most precious institutions” and its staff now and down the years. “My own personal thanks go to all those who support me in managing my diabetes,” the prime minister added. Guy Opperman, the Conservative MP for Hexham in Northumberland, marked the anniversary by writing in Newcastle’s Evening Chronicle about the “incredible debt” he owed to the NHS after it twice saved his life. On the first occasion he had fallen and been crushed by a horse while competing as a jockey in a race at Stratford. “My entire left side was staved in, giving me 14 broken ribs, a kidney cut in half, a perforated spleen and a pneumothorax – when you pop a rib through your lungs.” The second time was when he collapsed in the House of Commons in 2011 and was found to have “a brain tumour the size of a woman’s fist”. On both occasions, he wrote, he was saved by the skill of NHS doctors and surgeons. Lauren Turner Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian Away from the events and the tributes, at King’s College hospital in south London, Sister Lauren Turner was seeing patients through A&E. As nurse-in-charge, she was assigning staff to all the patients being treated, trying to keep on top of the four-hour target. “We’ve had someone removed already for threatening behaviour,” she said. “That’s not the best part of the job. It can just be so busy, and you still have keep people safe. I never want to see people waiting for seven hours, elderly people who need to see a doctor.” At her unit, the day had also seen a cardiac arrest, a patient in resuscitation, another sent to intensive care, but also minor limb injuries where staff can “patch them up and send them home”. The department has seen three major incidents in the past year, the Westminster and London Bridge terror attacks and the Grenfell Tower fire. “When they declare a major incident, we have to clear the whole department. It’s stressful but it’s also why so many of us work here, it’s the kind of people we are, the drama, the life-saving element. That’s why we do the job,” said Turner.<doc-sep>Why does our society provide health services collectively rather than privately? Why don’t we all simply, as individuals, buy what we need (medicines, consultations, treatments, operations, etc) as and when we need them, rather than funding it all through the tax system? What makes buying healthcare so different from buying groceries or flights abroad? We don’t have a national supermarket service, or a national holiday service. So why do we have a national health service? Why not let the market work its magic, balancing supply and demand, sending price signals, driving efficiencies and forcing up quality? Unless you’re a market fundamentalist or a libertarian ideologue, the answers to these questions probably seem obvious. Yet they are nevertheless worth asking as the NHS turns 70 this week, since the answers can help us to appreciate the reasons for its foundation, to grasp the ways in which it falls short and also to see what we need to do to put the health service on a stable footing for the future. First the economics. Health costs can be large and are often random. We don’t know when we might get sick and how much we might need to pay for treatment. Those features make the overwhelming case for some kind of insurance system, where such financial risks are socially pooled. 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Several European countries have social insurance systems, where employees and employees make contributions and a diverse array of specialist independent health companies and hospitals supply the care in return for funds from the communal pot. But if you want everyone to have access to healthcare, regardless of ability to pay, there does need to be a large element of taxpayer subsidy, non-discrimination regulation and a compulsion to participate in an insurance scheme. Leave it to “the market” and the market will fail, as the American experience shows. The US has a vast private health insurance infrastructure, but those features of compulsion, non-discrimination and redistribution are lacking or incomplete, with the result that some 30 million working age Americans go without the health coverage they need. It was to end this kind of grotesque inequality in access to healthcare that the NHS was founded by Labour in 1948. There are very good reasons for pride in that historic achievement. Seventy years ago it was not outlandish to suggest that the NHS was, in the words of its founder Nye Bevan, the “envy of the world”. But is that true today? A report from various UK think tanks, including the King’s Fund and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, last week highlighted evidence that the NHS is lagging behind other systems on a number of health outcome indicators, ranging from cancer survival rates, to managing those with pulmonary disease to post-heart attack mortality. ✕ NHS to scrap 'unnecessary or risky' procedures A major cross-country study last year of amenable mortality – measuring the rate at which people die of conditions that could feasibly have been treated – showed the UK performing poorly relative to several other developed countries. Critics are probably right to say that paeans from politicians to the glories of the NHS unhelpfully distract us from this sobering reality. The important question is whether more money for the health service will improve outcomes, or whether there’s some kind of structural impediment. We do spend less on health as a proportion of GDP than the likes of Germany, France, Japan and Sweden – countries that have tend to have better outcomes. It’s not unreasonable to hypothesise that we could get better results if we spent more, particularly on equipment such as scanners. The last eight years of gross underfunding for the health service relative to the demands being placed on it by an ageing population certainly provides powerful evidence that if we don’t significantly increase its resources, outcomes will deteriorate further. It’s often asserted by right-wing newspapers and libertarian pressure groups that social insurance systems are much more efficient than the centralised “bureaucratic” NHS, with the implication that we can wring out better results without spending more if we would only commission more private providers, or impose radical structural reforms. Yet, as last week’s think tank report also crisply spelled out, the NHS is actually very efficient relative to other systems, including those that have adopted the social insurance model. Despite the perennial complaints about managers, the NHS spends less on administration than comparable systems. It also prescribes more generic medicines, keeping the overall drugs bill down. There is certainly scope for the NHS to learn from other successful health systems around the world.<doc-sep>He said: "The NHS is something that we can too easily take for granted. It's been there for me throughout my life and has also saved many of my family members lives."<doc-sep>
Staff and patients are set to join celebrations across the UK on Thursday to mark the 70th birthday of the NHS. Services will be held at Westminster Abbey and York Minster to commemorate 70 years to the day that Aneurin Bevan, then the health secretary, launched the NHS at Park hospital, Manchester (now Trafford General hospital). Thousands of tea parties will take place to raise money for NHS charities and dozens of landmark buildings will be bathed in blue light, including Blackpool Tower, Gateshead Millennium Bridge and the London Eye. As it enters its eighth decade, the NHS faces pressing questions about its sustainability, with record numbers of people waiting at A&E and for treatment. Aneurin Bevan launched the NHS at the 400-bed Park hospital in Davyhulme, Manchester, on 4 July 1948. Photograph: Alamy But Thursday will be an opportunity to celebrate its achievements, which have seen it grow to be the world’s largest publicly funded health service, dealing with more than 1 million patients every 36 hours and sharing out over £100bn a year. Simon Stevens, the NHS England chief executive, said: “The reason why the health service does so well is frankly due to the brilliance of the staff … And it’s frankly because of the staff that the nation has just recommitted to the idea of a health service [that is] there when you need us, based on how sick you are, not whether you can afford us – a principle that has stood the test of time.” On Wednesday night Theresa May told a gathering of NHS staff at Downing Street that the UK was marking “a very special birthday of a very special institution. In a world that has changed almost beyond recognition [since 1948], the vision at the heart of the NHS – of a tax-funded service that is available to all, free at the point of use, with care based on clinical need and not the ability to pay – still retains near-universal acceptance.” She credited the role of a politician from each of Britain’s three main political parties in the creation of the NHS: William Beveridge (the Liberal who in 1942 set out how the government could fight the five “giant evils” of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness); Nye Bevan (the health minister in Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government regarded as the NHS’s founding father); and the little-known Sir Henry Willink who in 1944, as the health minister in Winston Churchill’s wartime government, unveiled a health policy white paper that first set out the government’s intention to create a national health service along the lines that were established in 1948. Theresa May speaks to assembled guests as she hosts a reception to mark the 70th anniversary of the NHS at 10 Downing Street. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images Teenager Freya Lewis, a survivor of the Manchester terror attack who suffered 29 separate injuries, and Dr Martin Griffiths, a leading NHS trauma surgeon who led a team treating victims of the London Bridge attack, will be among those taking part in the Westminster Abbey service, which begins at noon. Freya paid tribute to the “incredible care” she received at the Royal Manchester children’s hospital. “What happened last May showed the very darkest side of humanity but so many things that I have experienced since have shown me and my family how amazing people can be,” she said. Singer Linda Nolan, who is being treated for breast cancer, will host a choral concert at York Minster. She will be joined by 15-year-old Eve Senior, another survivor of the Manchester Arena attack, who wants to become a nurse, and Amen Dhesi who – aged 13 – became a carer for his dad who has bipolar disorder. The services will be attended by about 3,000 NHS staff from across the country as well as representatives of charities, councils, and other key NHS partners. The NHS is one of the world’s largest employers, with more than 1.5 million staff, among them Aileen Coomber, 81, a mental health nurse at Sussex Partnership NHS foundation trust, whose employment in the service has spanned 65 years so far. She will carry in the manifest at the Westminster Abbey service. Coomber still remembers life before the NHS when her mother could not always afford to take her to the doctor.