Crisis in the UK National Health Service: What does it mean, and what are the consequences?

Abstract

There have been more-or-less continual suggestions that the UK National Health Service (NHS) has been suffering from one kind of crisis or another since its creation in 1948. If we are to understand the problems the NHS faces, then we need to empirically investigate what kinds of crises it has faced, if such crises have patterns to them, and whether or not they tend to lead to policy change. This article considers NHS crisis in terms of academic accounts of its history, as well in occurrences of the term ‘NHS crisis’ (and its synonyms) in national newspaper headlines from the 1980s up to 2020 through the application of topic modelling. The combination of these two sources of data leads to the construction of a typology of NHS crises. Having constructed this typology, we can then examine the timing and frequency of NHS crises, and consider the relationship between crises and periods of policy change, as well as to the wider economic and social context in which crises occur through the notion of the ‘NHS spatio-temporal fix’.