Dr Stoate discusses the 60th anniversary of the founding of the NHS 

The sixtieth anniversary of the National Health Service has just passed us by. It’s an anniversary that has a particular resonance for Dartford in view of the extraordinary number of hospitals and other health institutions that have been housed in the borough over the last century or so.

Not many of them remain today but when the NHS was founded in 1948 Dartford was home not only to the hospitals at Joyce Green and West Hill but to the Southern Hospital at Gore Farm in Darenth, the Livingstone Hospital and the isolation hospital at Long Reach. It also had the mental health facilities at Stone House, Bexley and Darenth Park.  A few parts of the Orchard isolation Hospital, which had been heavily fire-bombed during the war, were also still standing. Older Dartford residents would also have had memories of the infamous hospital ships, moored in the Thames at Long Reach by the Metropolitan Asylums Board to house Victorian and Edwardian London’s smallpox and fever victims. Few other places in the country could have matched this level of provision.

Changing clinical practices have rendered most of them redundant. Medical or surgical procedures which once required a one or two week stay in hospital can now be done as day cases and long convalescent stays are now a thing of the past. Pharmacological advances have also revolutionised the way in which we deal with mental health patients. The vast hospitals of the 1940s with their thousands of beds have been replaced therefore with much smaller hospitals, such as Darent Valley, with their hi-tech diagnostic and treatment facilities.

The hospital buildings of 1948 may have gone but many of the NHS staff who came to Dartford to work in them in the intervening years, including me, are still here. I arrived at Joyce Green Hospital as a junior doctor on New Year’s Eve 1977. I remember the day well as I’d driven through Temple Hill to get there in a torrential rainstorm that more or less finished off my car. Looking back now it’s hard to believe that the service we had then is in any way related to today’s NHS. A vast, rambling complex with over two dozen wards and its own farm and gardens, somehow sheltered from the wind off the Thames, Joyce Green was so large that you needed a bike to get around it in a hurry. Its facilities were basic however by today’s standards and sections of it had a rather cavalier attitude to health and safety. I can vividly remember the sea of cockroaches for instance that often lined the ground outside the kitchens at night which I had to try and navigate as I tore past on my bike on my way to a call. The NHS then was also a noticeably less risk aware institution than it is now. Professionals took risks then, not always for the best it must be said, with patients’ health that they wouldn’t dream of taking today, or certainly be allowed to take.

The sixtieth anniversary is an opportunity for us to remember the thousands of people who built the NHS in Dartford and worked so hard to get us where we are today. It is also a chance for us to reflect on the clinical progress we’ve made in sixty years. Procedures that weren’t being performed anywhere in the UK a generation ago are now commonplace. Hope is being given to patients today who twenty years ago would have had none. Without the NHS none of this would have been possible, and that’s something we should never forget.