The National Health Services Essay -- Health, Insurance

The National health services (NHS) provides a comprehensive healthcare services across the entire nation. It is considered to be UK’s proudest institution, and is envied by many other countries because of its free of cost health delivery to its population. Nevertheless, it is often seen as a ‘political football’ as it affects all of us in some way and hence everyone carry an opinion about it (Cass, 2006). Factors such as government policies, funding, number of service users, taxation etc all make up small parts of this large complex organisation. Therefore, any imbalances within one sector can pose a substantial risk on the overall NHS (Wheeler & Grice, 2000). This essay will discuss whether the NHS aim of reducing the nations need for provision of health was achieved or not, taking into account different health models. The concept of NHS came into power from 5th July 1948. Although, Bevan who had this ideology of ‘welfare state’ was successful in architecting NHS. In fact, the need for such a consolidation of service provision was initially identified in 1919 by the Dawson Committee report (Christopher, 2004). The state in which healthcare system operated before1948 was incomprehensive, full of inequality and even lacked in providing minimum adequate standards to the general public. The people living in poverty and on Low income (working class) were affected the most; whereas, rich families were able to afford the healthcare services adequately. The health insurance was provided under the National Insurance Act 191, but was only available to the workers, whereas, their dependants (wife and children’s) were excluded. Therefore, every time they used the services they were required to pay for it. Thus, because most... ...are immense, as it has only finite resources to use, but needs its services to be clinically effective as well as able to meet the needs of individual’s, their choice of preferences and be value for money. To accomplish this NHS will need to harness more securely its investment in surveillance, analysis and budgets, and therefore establishing a framework that would than serve and provide a better health outcome to the entire nation. Lastly, UK spends about half of what is spent by the US (about 14 % of GDP) on its healthcare, yet in US out of 250 million over 30 million citizens are still without health care provision. Thus, despite such a massive expenditure by US government, failure to provide basic health care to millions of its citizen is not overcome, however, that is certainly not the case in UK (Bilton, et al., 2002; Christopher, 2004; Smith I. , 2007).