“Medical treatment covering all requirements will be provided for all citizens by a national health service.”
Sir William Beveridge: Social Insurance and Allied Services (The Beveridge Report)
December 1942
Sir William Beveridge’s report, Social Insurance and Allied Services, proposes major changes to create the foundations for a welfare system and, in its support, a national health service (the details are left for later).
Pressure for the creation of a national health service had been building for decades with support from all parties. At the outbreak of the Second World War on 3 September 1939, an Emergency Hospital Service was created and this provided solid foundations for assimilating hospitals into what became the NHS.
The right to medical treatment for everyone under a new national health service is proposed by an inter-departmental committee led by Sir William Beveridge. The committee was asked to: “undertake, with special reference to the inter-relation of the schemes, a survey of the existing national schemes of social insurance and allied services”.
One of the provisions of Beveridge’s committee was that: “medical treatment covering all requirements will be provided for all citizens by a national health service organised under the health departments and post-medical rehabilitation treatment will be provided for all persons capable of profiting by it”.