The Resorm Of The National Health Service During The Blair Government

The National Health Service started on5July1948. As a "great national institution", NHS originally aims to offer free medical care to the whole population based on the need, not the ability to pay. The victory of the1945general election of the Labour Party and the appointment of Aneurin Bevan as the minister of the Department of Health directly led to the establishment of the NHS. The Labour Party played an important role in the establishment of the NHS as well as in the process of the NHS’s reform. In its early years, NHS still got many shortcomings. For example, many health care services were still outside of the NHS. The new born NHS run into economic troubles as soon as it came into work. The Treasury and the Department of Health did not stop fighting against each other until the Labour Party lost the1951general election. After13years, under the leadership of Harold Wilson, the Labour Party returned to power. The Labour Party had been in office for almost llyears since1964.Many problems in the NHS had been revealed. Relative reforms were needed to solve theses problems. The funding and structural problems were on the front line to be reformed. The Wilson and Callahan government reorganized the NHS and made great achievements. On one hand, the reconfiguration set a fixed mode for the allocation of the funds for the NHS, which avoided the unnecessary waste in the NHS; on the other hand, the reorganization incorporated the school services, port health and other environmental health services and the occupational health services into the NHS. In addition, new institutions were founded, such as the Area Health Authorities, the Family Practitioner Committee and the Regional Health Authorities, which laid the foundation for the following reforms.Unfortunately, the Labour Party lost the general election in1979and they were out of office for18years. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, the New Labour returned to power after a landslide win in the1997general election by virtue of her brand new image, the disunity of the Conservative Party and the public disappointment of the Conservative Party’s Health policy. Under the instruction of Labour’s new doctrines, the new government committed itself to the modernization of the NHS. In order to emphasis the differences from the ethos of the Conservative Party’s health policies, the New Labour called their approach to modernization a "third way". The New Labour did not abandon all the previous health policies as their political rhetorics depicted. As a matter of fact, the New Labour’s health policies were consistent with the internal market programme.The modernization instilled dynamics into the NHS and helped to improve the quality and efficiency of the health care services. However, the New Labour’s reconfiguration brought about many new problems. The devolution broke the balance between the center and the periphery; the health inequalities and inefficiency still exist; the funding problems still puzzles the NHS. All these problems are hard to deal with for the following governments, and these difficulties are at the same time challenging the NHS itself as well.