ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with resource allocation in the early National Health Service (NHS), and the policy background to the creation of the Resource Allocation Working Party (RAWP) of the early 1970s. Inequalities in health, and geographical variations in access to health care, are among the most important themes in contemporary health policy. Yet while historians are increasingly aware of geographical variations in health provision in Britain before the Second World War, and of concerns about health inequalities in the period before the publication of the Black Report (1980), less attention has been paid to resource allocation under the early NHS.1 It therefore seeks to incorporate the theme of resource allocation into broader debates about the financing of British medicine since 1850.
