Abstract
In 1911, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the introduction of National Health Insurance established a national statutory system of health care specifically for workers to maintain their working capacity. Though it was to be provided outside the workplace by panel doctors, this legislation set a precedent and ensuing debates on the question of state health care frequently presumed that workers would be the beneficiaries. Subsequently, the development of factory legislation, albeit in a piecemeal fashion, led to a state service within the workplace. This, however, was based on preventing harm, was poorly staffed and aimed to meet minimum standards rather than foster improvements.
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Notes
Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick (hereafter MRC), National Union of Railwaymen Archive, MSS.127/NU/GS/3/87, Amalgamated Engineering Union, ‘First Report on Health and Welfare Parts I and II’, (1944), typescript reports.
See C. Wrightman, More Than Munitions: Women, Work and the Engineering Industries 1900–1950 (Harlow, 1999), pp. 133–155.
Factory Department: Ministry of Labour and National Service, Memorandum on Medical Supervision in Factories Form 327 (London, 1946).
MRC, TUC Archive, MSS.292/142/1, Association of Industrial Medical Officers, ‘The Place of an Industrial Medical Service in a Post-War Comprehensive National Health Service’ (1943).
See J. T. Carter, ‘Fifty Years of Medicine in the Workplace: The Contribution of the Society of Occupational Medicine to Occupational Health Practice, 1935–1985’, Journal of the Society of Occupational Medicine, 35 (1985), 4–22.
Ministry of Health, A National Health Service (1944), Cmd 6502.
These issues came to the fore in the proceedings of the Dale Committee, published in 1951 and explored in detail in the next chapter: Report of a Committee of Enquiry on Industrial Health Services (1951) Cmd 8170.
A detailed account of the views expressed by different medical, professional and political organisations leading up to the establishment of the NHS is given in C. Webster, The Health Services Since the War Volume I: Problems of Health Care the National Health Service Before 1957 (London, 1988), pp. 44–94.
National Archives, Public Records Office (hereafter PRO), MH 80/30, ‘Notes on main points taken in BMA Council’s Report on Bill’, February 1946.
Select Committee on National Expenditure, Health and Welfare of Women in War Factories (London, 1942), discussed in Chapter 1.
J. T. Carter noted that Brunner Mond, one of three companies which merged to form Imperial Chemical Industries in 1926, employed salaried doctors prior to 1914: Carter, ‘Fifty Years of Medicine’, 5. See also R. Fitzgerald, British Labour Management and Industrial Welfare, 1846–1939 (London, 1988), pp. 118–125.
However, David Walker’s research demonstrated that employers in the British Chemical Industry, including Imperial Chemical Industries, prioritised profit over workers’ health. Health and welfare measures were designed to promote productivity and to minimise, but not remove, risk: see D. Walker, ‘Occupational Health and Safety in the British Chemical Industry, 1914–1974’ (PhD Thesis, University of Strathclyde, 2007).
TUC Archive, MSS.292/142/1, TUC Social Insurance Committee, ‘Summary of Replies to Questionnaire Issue by Sub-Committee on Development of Industrial Medical Services in Factories’, 10 November 1948.
TUC Archive, MSS.292C/140/1, TUC Social Insurance and Industrial Welfare Committee, ‘Occupational Health Service’, 8 October 1952.
PRO, LAB 14/712, Mary Smieton, ‘An Occupational Health Service’, 6 October 1953.
For a detailed account of these developments, see N. Tiratsoo and J. Tomlinson, Industrial Efficiency and State Intervention: Labour 1939–51 (London, 1993).
MRC, BEC Archive, MSS.200/B/3/2/C1024 pt 2, letter from John Sadd to Kenneth Burton, ‘Proposed Industrial Health Services’, 4 October 1954.
A. Meiklejohn, ‘Halifax, Stoke-on-Trent — Whither?’, Transactions of the Society of Occupational Medicine, 9 (1960), 143–144; 143.
International Labour Office, Report IV (2) of the Forty-Third Session of the International Labour Conference (1959), cited in ‘Occupational Health Services’, British Medical Journal, 2:5243 (1 July 1961), 37–38.
Medical Services Review Committee, A Review of the Medical Services in Great Britain (London, 1962);
British Medical Association, The Future of Occupational Health Services (London, 1961).
D. Stewart, ‘The Future of Occupational Health’, British Medical Journal, 1:4646 (21 January 1950), 156–159; ‘Occupational Health Service’, British Medical Journal. 2:4898 (20 November 1954): 1214–1216.
R. Johnston and A. McIvor, ‘Whatever Happened to the Occupational Health Service? The NHS, the OHS and the Asbestos Tragedy on Clydeside’, in C. Nottingham (ed), The NHS in Scotland: The Legacy of the Past and the Prospect of the Future (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 79–105: 90.
F. H. Tyrer, ‘Group Occupational Health Schemes’, Journal of the Society of Occupational Medicine, 30 (1980), 118–122.
Tyrer served as President of the Society of Occupational Medicine in 1980: see R. M. Archibald, ‘Obituary: Frank H. Tyrer’, Journal of the Society of Occupational Medicine, 36 (1986), 73.
One recent correspondent to Occupational Medicine recalled: ‘Fifty years ago “Industrial Medicine” really was a Cinderella among medical specialities, and doctors often entered it “faute de mieux” when they could not obtain a specialist or hospital appointment.’ H. Engel, ‘Why I Became an Occupational Physician’, Occupational Medicine, 58 (2009), 151.
In one sense this reflects the thesis advanced by Keith Middlemas and discussed in Chapter 3 that the State prevented political upheaval by incorporating employer associations and trade unions into governance in the years 1916 to 1962: See K. Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society: The Experience of the British System Since 1911 (London, 1979).
More generally, historians have argued that both main political parties pursued a similar set of collectivist policies in the post-war years until economic problems in the 1970s forced the parties apart. An overview of this debate is provided in S. Glynn and A. Booth, Modern Britain: An Economic and Social History (London, 1996), pp. 184–187.
M. Greenberg, ‘The Last Senior Medical Inspector of Factories and His Place in the History of Occupational Health’, American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 49 (2006), 54–59: 54.
See G. R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency (Oxford, 1971);
S. Sturdy, ’The Industrial Body’, in R. Cooter and J. Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth Century (London, 2003), pp. 213–234.
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© 2011 Vicky Long
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Long, V. (2011). A National Industrial Health Service?. In: The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230303836_6
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