The NHS in Scotland by Chris Nottingham

Author:Chris Nottingham [Nottingham, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138337626
Google: GmnjygEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-02-26T04:50:44+00:00

Conclusion

The present government has recently launched an attack on social exclusion, and in 1997 Scotland’s own Social Exclusion Network was set up. There are also high hopes that Scotland’s new Parliament will focus more attention and resources on the issue of social exclusion. What is lamentable, though, is that the newly devolved Scottish Executive does not have any control over Scottish occupational health - which still remains with the bodies set up under the HSWA - for it is at the workplace that many health-related inequalities could be quickly addressed. It has been estimated that over the next 25 years a quarter of a million people will die in Britain because of exposure to asbestos at their work.84 By far the majority of these individuals could be termed as belonging to the working class. Therefore, the notion that the working class has derived less benefit from national health care policy than other classes is difficult to challenge on the strength of this evidence. Many of these sufferers will also have spent most of their adult lives working for small companies in diverse work sites where occupational health care was non-existent, and where visits from the factory inspector were few and far between. The long latency period of their disease means that many of them were in contact with asbestos at work throughout the 50 years in which the NHS has been in existence. But all the NHS has done for them is provide palliative care long after the damage had been done. Sadly, this is a case in which the work wounded cannot be sent back into the field of battle.

Despite the importance of Britain’s NHS, then, its continued emphasis on curative rather than preventative care means its impact as a social welfare measure has been blunted. The omission of an occupational health service reflects this emphasis on the curative. Over much of the 50 year period in which the NHS has been in existence, the medical profession, the trade union movement, and many workers themselves, have asked that occupational health be given much more attention. Despite this, occupational health has consistently been treated as a distant relative of mainstream health care - and we can only hope that the new consultation approach adopted by the HSE will address this. It is significant, however, that a new book detailing 50 years of the NHS - with a forward by the Prime Minister - makes no mention of the subject.85 The NHS did not embrace and integrate occupational health and safety for a number of reasons; clashes of interest between ministries (especially Labour and Health); cost, in a period of spiralling health expenditure; and a prevailing sense by policy-makers that the NHS would be the panacea for all ills. This was in the face of concerted campaigns on the part of the trade unions to strengthen occupational health provision. The protective matrix offered by the state was further diluted by the disbanding of the government’s occupational health research bureau in 1948

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.