NHS needs plan for all acute, rehabilitative, and long stay care

doi:10.1136/bmj.322.7288.735

BMJ 2001;322:735 ( 24 March )

Letters

NHS needs plan for all acute, rehabilitative, and long stay care

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Everyone sees the world from where he or she stands. Seeing the NHS through American eyes, Leatherman and Blackmanbelieve that the service has fundamentally "got it right."¹Yet, fundamentally, the NHS no longer exists, for the 1990 CommunityCare Act changed the legislation in 1948 that underpinnedit.

The NHS, operational research, and rehabilitation were three healthcare legacies of the second world war.² The operationalplan that underpinned the NHS transferred wards full of bedboundpatients to hospital care from local government care. From thatunlikely beginning the specialty of geriatrics began.³ If thehospital responsibility for providing a free long stay serviceis taken away then the driving, rehabilitative force that underpinnedthe NHS ceases toexist.

During the Thatcher years a cruel trick was played on pensioners, as well as on entrepreneurs. Using the rhetoric of markets,choice, and quality, the government transferred responsibilityfor long stay . . . [Full text of this article]