History of the National Health Service History of the National Health Service The name National Health Service (NHS) is used to refer to the four public health services of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, individually or collectively, though only England's NHS officially has this title. For details of the history of each National Health Service, particularly since 1999, see: The NHS was the first universal health care system established anywhere in the world. A leaflet was sent to every household in June 1948 which explained that The NHS in Scotland was established as a separate entity with its own legislation, the National Health Service (Scotland)
History of the National Health Service over by Aneurin Bevan in Clement Attlee's Labour Party government after the war ended. Bevan decided that the 1944 white paper's proposal for local authority control of voluntary hospitals was not workable, as he felt that local authorities were too small to manage hospitals. He decided that "the only thing to do was to create an entirely new hospital service, to take over the voluntary hospitals, and to take over the local government hospitals and to organise them as a single hospital service". This structure of the NHS in England and Wales was established by the National Health Service Act