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Avis Hutt in her home in Kentish Town |
Avis Hutt shares her birthday with the NHS
WHEN health minister Aneurin Bevan argued in parliament for a national health service in 1948 he said he represented majority opinion in Britain. And Avis Hutt, now 91, was one of many health professionals who backed him – by speaking at factories where she worked as a nurse and on platforms for the campaigning Socialist Medical Association.
Adopted from the poorhouse where she was abandoned in 1917, Avis became a nurse in the mid-30s where, with her husband, a leading surgeon, Ruscoe Clarke, she developed ideas encompassing the notion of a health service in place of the private medical service that left millions without proper health care.
During the war, while her husband served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, Avis worked as an industrial nurse in an aircraft factory, witnessing the advances being made in blood transfusions, antibiotics and laboratory services through wartime public planning.
“There was an over-riding demand for change in society,” she says. “I’m glad that today’s generation is able to see the reality of national health care. ”
From protest marches and soapbox oratory outside factory gates, to attending protest meetings, Avis played a major part in the campaign for a “national health service free at the point of use”.
Decades later she still treasures her copy of the 1942 report of social reformer Sir William Beveridge, whose five “giant evils” of “want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness” were highly influenced by the sentiment of the time.
But despite the clamouring for change, most of the British Medical Association’s 35,000 members were set against a free integrated health service at the time. “Doctors had established themselves as gods and were reluctant to give up their position,” says Avis.
Bevan managed to turn the tide of opposition in his favour after he struck a deal with the president of the Royal College of Physicians, Lord Moran, allowing individual practitioners to choose to operate privately.
Decades after the establishment of the NHS had seen child mortality rates slashed by half, Avis’s teamwork approach to healthcare – where doctors, health visitors (an area she personally developed) and physiotherapists work together – as realised in a multi-disciplinary course in geriatric care at the Royal Free and Middlesex hospitals.
Sitting in her Kentish Town home, yards from the Caversham group practice in Bartholomew Road which is planning to merge with the James Wigg practice in Peckwater Street, Avis explains why she supports the principle of polyclinics in Lord Darzi’s review of NHS healthcare for London. “I’m in favour of polyclinics,” she says. “They seem to me to be an extension of the health centres which were central to the establishment of the NHS, where knowledgeable teams work together and not in financial or professional competition with each other.”
As ever her views on the purpose of the service she has seen grow from infant to giant remain clear in her mind.
“I’m very concerned by the attempts to undermine the NHS by introducing UnitedHealth [the private company in control of three of Camden’s GP surgeries] into the equation, which operates for the benefit of its shareholders,” she said. “It is totally against the concept and philosophy of the NHS.” |
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A. Clarke
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