About NHS 75

5 July 2023 marks 75 years of the National Health Service

The NHS in Wales touches all our lives, and today we cannot imagine life without it. As we mark 75 years of the NHS, we look back on the achievements of our organisation, as well as looking ahead to the opportunities we have to shape the future. 75 years on, the NHS’s founding principles remain intact.  

75 Years of the NHS

When it was founded by Welsh MP Aneurin Bevan on 5 July 1948, inspired by the Tredegar Workmen’s Medical Aid Society, the NHS was the first universal health system to be available to all, free at the point of delivery. Those principles remain as relevant, and valued, today as they did in the years after the Second World War.

And since then, the NHS has innovated and adapted to meet the needs of each successive generation, always putting patients at the heart of everything it does.

• The NHS in Wales carries out around 360 thousand patient consultations every month in secondary care alone (not including GP visits or diagnostics)
• There are 79 babies born a day in Wales / with one birth every 18 minutes
• On average there are over 8,500 occupied NHS beds in Wales every day
• In the last 12 months, more than 20,000 patients started cancer treatment in Wales