NHS posters and leaflets

In 1948, the Ministry of Health, Central Office of Information and other parts of government, were engaged in a ‘positive programme’ of publicity to inform British citizens just what the NHS was, and what they needed to do to access it.

Key to this was explaining that people needed to register with an NHS general practitioner (GP), who would refer them to all other NHS services. Prior to the NHS people had had many different relationships with doctors.

‘The first thing is to link up with a doctor’, this Scottish advertisement, used in newspapers before the ‘appointed day’, tells readers. They are co-opted into a national mission as well, to ‘get the Service ready’ by registering.

95% of Britain’s population had signed up to the NHS before it opened. It was so popular that demand for the service quickly outstripped government expectation, and the nascent Service’s capacity. This was ‘the cost of social innovation’ Minister for Health Aneurin Bevan reassured his Cabinet colleagues, but the government publicity machine swung into action to moderate people’s expectations of the NHS.

This leaflet, part of a series 'on sensible use of the Service', was published between 1948 and 1950. It cautions citizens ‘no fairy wand was waved on July 5th’ and that there would be a delay in the service having its full complement of medics, offering advice on how people could take care of themselves before trying the NHS.

The new NHS brought a whole raft previously separate hospitals, laboratories, doctors’ surgeries, dentists, and local government health provision under one banner. It was therefore necessary to try and explain, to the public, but also to practitioners and others who suddenly found themselves as NHS employees, how they all linked together and who had responsibility for who.

This organisational chart from 1948 to 1949 provides a simplified chain of command for the NHS, also engagingly and graphically illustrating the early Service’s extent.

After the Second World War, a number of men that had gained medical experience in the armed forces decided to join the nursing profession. In the early 1950s men made up approximately 7% of nursing staff.

This poster from 1955 is encouraging men to consider nursing as a career choice, describing it as having good training, good pay and good prospects. At this time, men between the ages of 18 and 21 had to perform National Service which meant spending 18 months in one of the armed forces. The poster explains that men could defer until they finished their nursing training, and that they would be able to use their skills when they did their National Service.

This poster from the early 1970s is selling a career in nursing as an interesting and rewarding choice for women at at time when opportunities were more limited and expectations for a fulfilling career were often low.

The images show nurses training, travelling, socialising together and dealing with a variety of people who are 'much more interesting than files and typewriters'.

Contrasting with the more stylised depictions of nurses in earlier NHS recruitment posters, this poster used in the 1960s and 1970s shows nurses in the thick of it, providing treatment to an intubated man. Nursing is described as a ‘professional career’ but the tagline says that ‘people remember nurses’ – reinforced by the way the nurse in the foreground tenderly holds her patient’s hand while focused on his treatment.

Mental health issues have always been a feature of society, although the way they have been described has changed, and indeed grown more compassionate. ‘Mental nursing’, as it was sometimes called, was a feature of the NHS from its beginnings.

In 1965, one MP – David Griffiths, Labour MP for Rother Valley 1945–1970) – who remembered mental health provision under the Poor Laws in the 1920 said the progress the government had made in how people were treated was ‘remarkable’ but there was still more to be done. Part of this work was recruiting passionate and talented nurses, via campaigns like this one in the 1950s.

Since its inception NHS recruitment programmes have often focused on nurses and other medics such as doctors, dentists and other healthcare professionals. But the Service has always been much more than that. Patients need feeding and moving, the hospitals need cleaning and maintaining, the vast administrative machinery of a national healthcare body needs to be operated.

A government inquiry into the recruitment of administrative staff in 1963 feared that recruitment of administrative staff was too decentralised and unstructured, and for much of the NHS’ history recruitment of support staff was left to individual hospitals or authorities, with some oversight of numbers. However, central government provided publicity material, showing the range of professions which were need to operate the NHS.