The Influence of Health Care Reform on Intensive Care: A UK Perspective

摘要

For a society emerging from the privations of the Second World War, the National Health Service (NHS)'s founding principles of social inclusion and universal health care coverage funded through general taxation were both noble and necessary. Hospital specialists, initially suspicious of salaried government control, gradually came to be the service's most vigorous defendants, though general practitioners (family doctors) were careful to retain their position as independent contractors and "gatekeepers." The size of the enterprise ensured that most of the population had direct experience of the NHS, and the service attracted considerable public trust and support despite chronic underfunding.