NHS

History

When Clement Attlee's Labour Party won the 1945 election he appointed Aneurin Bevan as Health Minister. Bevan then embarked upon what the official historian of the NHS, Charles Webster, called an "audacious campaign" to take charge of the form the NHS finally took. Bevan's National Health Service was proposed in Westminster legislation for England and Wales from 1946 and Scotland from 1947, and the Northern Ireland Parliament's Public Health Services Act 1947. NHS Wales was split from NHS (England) in 1969 when control was passed to the Secretary of State for Wales. According to one history of the NHS, "In some respects the war had made things easier. In anticipation of massive air raid casualties, the Emergency Medical Service had brought the country's municipal and voluntary hospitals into one umbrella organisation, showing that a national hospital service was possible". Webster wrote in 2002 that "the Luftwaffe achieved in months what had defeated politicians and planners for at least two decades".