This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Unmasking Medicine given by Ian Kennedy

was originally broadcast in 1980.

It's hard to avoid the grave conclusion that the National Health Service has failed us.

Certainly it's failed to take its opportunities.

It must be our task to make it clear to government

and those who manage and control medicine that we're not content to watch our healthcare services

merely tick over at their present level, far less slowly disintegrate. There can be and must

be improvement, and it's our responsibility to ensure that it happens.

The provision of healthcare rests on political and social decisions.

The political values which are supposed to be at the heart of any decisions made for the provision of healthcare are well known.

That need should be the sole criterion of receipt of service,

and that funds should be raised on the basis of ability to contribute. Though these values

haven't formally been rejected as principles, commitment to them has certainly wavered. Indeed,

the provision of health care in practice has seen a systematic and widespread

departure from them. What I propose to put before you is a blueprint for action. It represents

an attempt to reassert our faith in these principles by adopting measures which will go a long

way towards seeing them become reality.

Before I go on, let me point to the forces which stand against change and improvement.

We've already noticed some of the ways in which modern medicine has taken the wrong path.

With the decline of serious threats to health from infections,

our healthcare system has turned away from environmental considerations towards the notion of personal health care. It's become an illness service rather

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