In this two part interview, Sir George Godber GCB, former Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health and Social Security, 1960-73, talks initially of medical training in Oxford and London and the origins of his interests in public health medicine and health service administration. After junior appointments, brief experience of general practice, and DPH and MRCP studies between 1933 and 1939, he entered the Ministry of Health as a medical officer. Experience of hospital surveys and wartime special medical services followed. The weight of discussion then turns to the influences and developments leading to a National Health Service, including the Beveridge Report, wartime emergency hospital services, and the prevailing climate of professional and political debate on health care and welfare. The parts played by the various professional bodies and such critical catalysts as Chief Medical Officer Sir Wilson Jameson and post-war Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan are duly reviewed. There is privileged insight into the various factions and personalities involved.Discussion then turns to administrative responsibilities and concerns at the Ministry of Health relating to effective organisation of the new NHS, including the development of regional management and a balanced distribution of specialist services. The flow of this review also encompasses such issues as problems in staff grading and the state of psychiatry in the 1950s.
Inauguration of the National Health Service, health service planning, wartime and post-war developments in hospital services, policies on smoking, post-graduate medical education, the Medical Research Council, Ministry of Health administration, Wilson Jameson, Aneurin Bevan.
Health services administration, Public health, Science and state (science funding/policy), NHS,
vid-093, MSVA_104
Permanent link to this resource: https://doi.org/10.24384/000191
Godber, GeorgeBooth, ChristopherLock, Stephen
Learning Resources
Original artefact: 1994 RADAR resource: 2017
Oxford, UK
© Oxford Brookes University; The Royal College of Physicians Published by Oxford Brookes UniversityAll rights reserved.