ABSTRACT
When the National Health Service (NHS) was established, it inherited a collection of hospital assets which no national health authority would have invested in, had one existed before the war. The 1962 Hospital Plan for England and Wales, and its counterparts for the other parts of the UK, represented the first national attempt to provide an acceptable standard of hospital services across the country as a whole. The so-called IMF crisis in the mid-1970s led to major cutbacks in the hospital building programme and the 1980 Consultation Document made it clear that planning had to proceed on a piecemeal basis. It has again become commonplace to talk in terms of a switch from acute to non-acute, or sometimes secondary to primary, or 'hospital to community' as though it were self-evidently correct. A year later, a Consultation Document, The Future of Hospital Provision in England reaffirmed the validity of the district general hospital.
