Love and the teaching hospital: planning, publics, and the reorganisation of London’s teaching hospital system
Ed Devane will present extracts from his PhD on the history of NHS planning and healthcare facilities.
Whether due to wartime bomb damage or decades of under-investment, the poor condition of inherited buildings was one of the earliest crises the British National Health Service (NHS) had to contend with. Yet for almost fourteen years, no central government policy came close to providing adequate support for the development of new facilities. Ed Devane’s project looks at how the planning and design of hospitals and health centres continued as a dynamic, locally rooted, and often contentious process, which is altogether symbolic of how the wider health service developed and acquired meaning.