HEALTH SERVICE – 1948

The year of 1948 was to see the single biggest step forward in welfare provision that Britain witnessed in the 20th century – the introduction of the National Health Service. It was the guarantor of medical services for the people.

But, in many respects, Orkney had already led the way in establishing a countywide infrastructure for health care, and in the 25 years prior to the NHS, major developments had seen the islands at the forefront of moves towards a caring and comprehensive network of hospitals and doctors, funded by benefactors, insurance committees and council finance.

By the mid-1930s, every island and parish had access to a doctor, Kirkwall had its own hospital with a surgeon, the county was served not only by motor ambulance but also air ambulance, and schemes were in place to help the fight against such killers as Tuberculosis and Poliomyelitis. The statistics showed that the health and welfare of Orcadians was better than most, if not all, of the areas of Scotland at that time.

The Balfour family had been Orkney’s main benefactors of health services in the 19th century, and, at the start of the 20th century, Kirkwall’s hospital was still based in Main Street in what would later become the West End Hotel.

However, in 1914, new benefactors came forward, when the widow and family of the late Baillie Robert Garden, of Kirkwall, offered to build a new hospital in his memory. World War One then intervened, of course, and so it was 1927 before the Garden Memorial Building was opened on the site of what is still today the site of Kirkwall’s Balfour Hospital.

Over 20 years later, on Monday, July 5, 1948, the Balfour Hospital – founded 112 years earlier by John Balfour of Trenabie – passed into public ownership under the National Health Services (Scotland) Act.

But that year had already illustrated that disease was no respecter of legislation. Two girls, an 11-year-old from Sandwick and a 12-year-old from Rendall, were both treated for Poliomyelitis. It was the first outbreak of Polio in Orkney since before World War Two.

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