ABSTRACT
Rudolf Klein offers an eloquent and persuasive account of the political context that resulted in the creation of the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom (UK) in 1948 (Klein, 2010). Although the events leading up to the creation of the NHS are inevitably open to interpretation, the outcome is subject to less debate—namely that the system placed the medical profession at the centre of the NHS power base, with various concessions to autonomy and self-regulation and, as a consequence, created a system demanding high levels of trust by patients, government and other stakeholders in the medical profession. Indeed:
The post war consensus was underpinned by trust in professionalism with the state and patients tending to trust the norms of professional self-regulation and state licensing procedures to ensure that health professionals and health care institutions operated in the best interests of patients and citizens.
(Rowe and Calnan, 2006, p. 376)