Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in this book. This book explains about the politics of hospital provision in early twentieth-century Britain. In exploring the development of local hospital systems, it considers how hospital systems developed in a local context in the thirty years before the pre-national health service (NHS) and explores how the social, economic and political structures and cultures of specific places shaped the development of institutional treatment. This book reviews the number and types of patients admitted and where they were admitted to including inpatient, outpatient and casualty services examining the role of the almoner, another neglected topic, in gate keeping access and considering the extent to which patient demographics were shaped by local socio-economic structures. It examines how systems grew from local demand, local resources and how they met or did not meet the challenges they faced.