Showing posts with label NHS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NHS. Show all posts

Friday, 24 April 2026

LONDON ROYAL HOSPITAL TAKES CARE OF THE MORGANS

Today, The Morgans and The Grandma have been treated at the London Royal Hospital for an acute stomach virus.

The family was reviewing Present Simple vs Present Continuous while having breakfast and suddenly began to feel unwell to the point where they ended up hallucinating seeing monsters and telling incoherent stories.

At this point, they are all still admitted to this prestigious health center and a speedy recovery is expected because tomorrow they are the star guests at the Guinness Women's Six Nations Rugby match between England and Wales, where Elsa Morgan is the guest star in the pre-match countdown while she is expected to sing Grândola, Vila Morena.

More information: Present Simple vs Present Continuous

The Royal London Hospital is a large teaching hospital in the Whitechapel neighbourhood of the Tower Hamlets borough of East London. It is part of Barts Health NHS Trust. It provides district general hospital services for the City of London and Tower Hamlets, and specialist tertiary care services for patients from across London and elsewhere. The current hospital building has 1248 beds and 34 wards. It opened in February 2012.

The hospital was founded in September 1740 and was originally named the London Infirmary. The name changed to the London Hospital in 1748, and in 1990 to the Royal London Hospital. 

The first patients were treated at a house in Featherstone Street, Moorfields. In May 1741, the hospital moved to Prescot Street, and remained there until 1757 when it moved to its current location on the south side of Whitechapel Road, Whitechapel, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

The hospital's roof-top helipad is the London's Air Ambulance operating base.

By the middle of the 18th century, there were five voluntary hospitals in London (St Bartholomew's, Guy's, St Thomas', Westminster and St George's) which provided free medical care to those who could not afford it. However, none was located to the east of the City, where it could have served the comparatively impoverished and rapidly growing population of Spitalfields and Whitechapel; this was the void that The London Hospital was to fill. The institution that was to become The Royal London Hospital was founded on 23 September 1740, when seven gentlemen met in the Feathers Tavern in Cheapside in the City of London to subscribe to the formation of an intended new infirmary.

On 3 November, The London Infirmary opened in a house on Featherstone Street, Moorfields. The staff consisted of one surgeon, physician and apothecary; and was operated as a voluntary hospital, in which patients were not charged for treatment and their care was funded charitably from annual subscription fees.

In May 1741, the hospital moved to larger premises in Prescot Street, at that time in an exceedingly bad district. The following year, 2nd Duke of Richmond was persuaded by the hospital's surgeon, John Harrison, to become the first President of the new hospital. The name changed to The London Hospital around 1748. The houses at Prescot Street were in an unfit state for use by 1744. A subscription fund for a new building was opened, and the current site was acquired at Whitechapel Mount (then relatively sparsely built on); however, funds were acquired slowly and it was not until 1751 that work began on the new building.

More information: The Royal London Hospital  

The purpose-built hospital, which was designed by Boulton Mainwaring and accommodated 300 beds was opened to staff and patients in September 1757.  The next year, the trustees of the charity acquired a royal charter so that they could constitute themselves as a legal entity.

Medical students had been recorded as studying under the staff of The London Hospital as private pupils since the year it had begun, however it was not until 1785 that the London Hospital Medical College was founded; chiefly through the efforts of William Blizard, the hospital's surgeon. Private medical schools had been long established, but the LHMC was the first purpose-built medical school in England and Wales organised in connection with a hospital. It amalgamated in 1995 with St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College, under the aegis of Queen Mary and Westfield College to become St Bartholomew's and The Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry.

In the 1870s, the medical staff determined to improve the quality of nursing care and in 1880 Eva Luckes was employed as Matron of the Hospital, a post which she held for nearly forty years. She was an influential nursing leader and instigated a new programme of nurse training, including the first Preliminary Training School for Nurses. She became known by her friend and mentor Florence Nightingale (also a Governor of The London Hospital) as O Matron of Matrons. Luckes produced over 470 matrons during her tenure including Military Matrons in Chief Ethel Becher, Maud McCarthy and Sarah Oram, and several matrons of large provincial voluntary hospitals and Poor Law infirmaries including Annie Sophia Jane McIntosh, Matron of St Bartholomew's Hospital.

In the late 1890s, Edith Cavell, who later helped some 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium during the First World War, trained under Luckes and worked as a nurse at the hospital.

Joseph Merrick, known as the Elephant Man, was admitted to the hospital in 1886 and spent the last few years of life there. His mounted skeleton is currently housed at the medical school, but is not on public display.

The chair of the hospital from 1931 to 1943 was a banker, William Henry Goschen. He led the funding of the hospital for over ten years and died there.

In March 2005 planning permission was granted for the redevelopment and expansion of The Royal London Hospital. The scheme was procured under a Private Finance Initiative contract in 2006. 

More information: BCD-Urbex

If a patient is cold, if a patient is feverish, 
if a patient is faint, if he is sick after taking food, 
if he has a bed-sore, 
it is generally the fault not of the disease, 
but of the nursing.
 
Florence Nightingale

Sunday, 5 July 2020

NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE, CARING PEOPLE IN THE UK

National Health Service
COVID continue affecting thousands of people around the world. Countries have reforced their national health services to fight against this pandemic. One of the oldest health services is the NHS, the publicly-funded healthcare systems of the United Kingdom.

The Grandma wants to talk about it and about the importance of these national health services around the world. Health is not a business, health is a right and we must preserve and invest in national health services because they are the first medical line who protect everybody, everywhere.

The Grandma wants to pay tribute to all medical services around the world talking about one of them, one of the oldest, the National Health Service of the United Kingdom that was created on a day like today in 1948.

The National Health Service (NHS) is the umbrella term for the publicly-funded healthcare systems of the United Kingdom (UK). Since 1948 it has been funded out of general taxation.

It is made up of the four separate systems of the four countries of the UK: The National Health Service in England, NHS Scotland, NHS Wales, and Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland. They were established together in 1948 as one of the major social reforms following the Second World War.

More information: NHS

The founding principles were that services should be comprehensive, universal and free at the point of delivery. Each service provides a comprehensive range of health services, free at the point of use for people ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom, apart from dental treatment and optical care.

In England, NHS patients have to pay prescription charges with a range of exemptions from these charges.

Each of the UK's health service systems operates independently, and is politically accountable to the relevant government: the Scottish Government, Welsh Government, Northern Ireland Executive, and the UK Government, responsible for England's NHS.

Taken together, the four National Health Services in 2015–2016 employed around 1.6 million people with a combined budget of £136.7 billion.

Thank you to National Health Service
In 2014 the total health sector workforce across the UK was 2,165,043. This broke down into 1,789,586 in England, 198,368 in Scotland, 110,292 in Wales and 66,797 in Northern Ireland.

In 2017, there were 691,000 nurses registered in the UK, down 1,783 from the previous year. However, this is the first time nursing numbers have fallen since 2008.

Every 24 hours it sees one million patients, and with 1.7 million staff it is the fifth biggest employer in the world.

When purchasing drugs, the NHS has significant market power that, based on its own assessment of the fair value of the drugs, influences the global price, typically keeping prices lower. Several other countries either copy the UK's model or directly rely on Britain’s assessments for their own decisions on state-financed drug reimbursements.

Dr Somerville Hastings, President of the Socialist Medical Association, successfully proposed a resolution at the 1934 Labour Party Conference that the party should be committed to the establishment of a State Health Service.

More information: NHS Scotland

Calls for a unified medical service can be dated back to the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law in 1909, but it was following the 1942 Beveridge Report's recommendation to create comprehensive health and rehabilitation services for prevention and cure of disease that cross-party consensus emerged on introducing a National Health Service of some description.

Conservative MP and Health Minister, Henry Willink later advanced this notion of a National Health Service in 1944 with his consultative White Paper A National Health Service which was circulated in full and short versions to colleagues, as well as in newsreel.

When Clement Attlee's Labour Party won the 1945 election he appointed Aneurin Bevan as Health Minister. Bevan then embarked upon what the official historian of the NHS, Charles Webster, called an audacious campaign to take charge of the form the NHS finally took.

Bevan's National Health Service was proposed in Westminster legislation for England and Wales from 1946 and Scotland from 1947, and the Northern Ireland Parliament's Public Health Services Act 1947.

Thank you to NHS staff
The NHS was born out of the ideal that good healthcare should be available to all, regardless of wealth.

Although being freely accessible regardless of wealth maintained Henry Willink's principle of free healthcare for all, Conservative MPs were in favour of maintaining local administration of the NHS through existing arrangements with local authorities fearing that an NHS which owned hospitals on a national scale would lose the personal relationship between doctor and patient.

Conservative MPs voted in favour of their amendment to Bevan's Bill to maintain local control and ownership of hospitals and against Bevan's plan for national ownership of all hospitals. The Labour government defeated Conservative amendments and went ahead with the NHS as it remains today; a single large national organisation, with devolved equivalents, which forced the transfer of ownership of hospitals from local authorities and charities to the new NHS.

Bevan's principle of ownership with no private sector involvement has since been diluted, with later Labour governments implementing large scale financing arrangements with private builders in private finance initiatives and joint ventures.

More information: NHS Wales

At its launch by Bevan on 5 July 1948 it had at its heart three core principles: That it meet the needs of everyone, that it be free at the point of delivery, and that it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay.

Three years after the founding of the NHS, Bevan resigned from the Labour government in opposition to the introduction of charges for the provision of dentures and glasses. The following year, Winston Churchill's Conservative government introduced prescription charges. These charges were the first of many controversies over reforms to the NHS throughout its history.

In 2020, the NHS issued medical advice in combating COVID-19 and partnered with tech companies to create computer dashboards to help combat the nation's coronavirus pandemic.

During the pandemic, the NHS also established integrated COVID into its 1-1-1 service line as well. Following his discharge from the St. Thomas' Hospital in London on 13 April 2020 after being diagnosed with COVID-19, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson described NHS medical care as astonishing and that NHS saved my life. No question.

In this time, the NHS underwent major re-organisation to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic.

More information: NHS Northern Ireland


Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance.

Plato