ABSTRACT

This chapter examines contest for power in voluntary hospitals in one northern industrial town in the half-century before the inauguration of the National Health Service (NHS). It explores three inter-linked themes: how the hospitals were financed, what effect the system of finance had on access to treatment, and what its impact on management structure was. Middlesbrough's late development, small middle class and high levels of occupational risk combined with environmental factors to shape voluntary institutions in the town. This mixed economy of hospital provision is explored in detail in B. M. Doyle, Searching for a System: Relations between Public and Private Hospitals in Inter-war Middlesbrough. The chapter explores these ideas through an investigation of North Ormesby Hospital and the North Riding Infirmary, Middlesbrough's two voluntary institutions, paying particular attention to finance, access, management and power. Overall, these two hospitals created memberships and management structures which may have been unusual by the standards of the first half of the twentieth century.