Treating over a million people a day in England, the NHS touches all of our lives. When it was founded in 1948, the NHS was the first universal health system to be available to all, free at the point of delivery.

Since 1948, the NHS has always evolved and adapted to meet the needs of each successive generation. From the world’s first CT scan on a patient in 1971, revolutionising the way doctors examine the body, to the world’s first test-tube baby born in 1978.

Large-scale vaccination programmes protected children from whooping cough, measles and tuberculosis, and in 1999 the meningitis C vaccine was offered nationally in a world first. More recently, during the pandemic, having a single national health service enabled us to carry out research at an unprecedented scale and find the world’s first effective treatment for COVID-19, dexamethasone, making it available across every hospital the same day it was approved. It enabled us to not just deliver the first accredited COVID-19 vaccine in the world but to rollout the NHS vaccine programme with a combination of speed and precision unseen elsewhere.

Latest data shows that the population of England has grown by almost 3.5 million in the past decade, and as a nation we are living longer than ever before. We are seeing more people in older age groups, with almost one in five of the population aged 65 and over, and that number is expected to grow in the years ahead.

As we mark 75 years of the NHS, we are looking back on our achievements, as well as looking ahead to the opportunities we have to shape the next 75.