History matters? History's role in health policy making

Medical History

Volumn 52, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 311-326

  Berridge, Virginia ^a  

^a LONDON SCHOOL OF HYGIENE AND TROPICAL MEDICINE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 49749113636     PISSN: 00257273     EISSN: 09505571     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0025727300000168     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Stephen Fry, 'The future's in the past', Observer, 9 July 2006.
2. Virginia Berridge, 'Public or policy understanding of history?', Soc. Hist. Med., 2003, 16 (3): 511-23.
3. The interview part of the study was funded by a small grant from the funding given by an anonymous donor to the History and Policy network of which the Centre for History in Public Health is a member. The interview part of the study was approved by the LSHTM ethics committee.
4. Berridge, op. cit., note 2 above. The use of historians "in house" is one difference between health and the Foreign Office, for example.
5. The interviewees were the following: 1 health services researcher with policy experience; 1 director in an NHS related organization; 3 academics who had been policy advisers; 1 political adviser; 1 journalist; 1 speech writer; 3 chairs of expert committees; 2 advisers at local policy level; 1 anthopologist; 1 member of research council staff.
6. Some historians with governmental experience also contributed through comment and personal experience.
7. For the Foresight study, see: www.foresight.gov.uk. The other study was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, www.jrf.org.uk.
8. Alan Milburn speech 14 Nov. 2002 taken from TheyWorkForYou.com, accessed 28 Feb. 2008.
9. John Reid, Localising the National Health Service: gaining greater equity through localism and diversity, London, New Local Government Network, [2003], pp. 24-5.
10. Hazel Blears, Communities in control: public services and local socialism, London, Fabian Society, 2003.
11. http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page9921.asp, accessed 26 Feb. 2008.
12. Interview with senior public health professional by Virginia Berridge, 17 Jan. 2006.
13. Presented at a workshop on 'Conducting and commissioning syntheses for managers and policy makers', Montreal, Canada, Dec. 2005.
14. E-mail from Dr Phil Davies, 19 Dec. 2005.
15. Interview with chair of expert committee 1 by Virginia Berridge, 18 Jan. 2006.
16. Interview with chair of expert committee 2 by Virginia Berridge, 6 March 2006.
17. Ibid.
18. Interview with policy adviser 1 by Virginia Berridge, 2 March 2006.
19. Ibid. Among the names mentioned in this context were Professors Nick Black and Nick Mays from LSHTM.
20. Interview with political adviser by Virginia Berridge, 5 April 2006.
21. Interview with policy adviser 1 by Virginia Berridge, 2 March 2006.
22. Ibid.
23. K Storeng, D Behague, O Campbell, 'An anthropological exploration of the uses of historical constructions by key players in the maternal health field', paper presented to LSHTM History Centre workshop on maternal health, May 2006, and interview with Katerini Storeng by Virginia Berridge; Irvine Loudon Death in childbirth, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992.
24. These comments illustrate the role of history as " enlightenment" drawing on theories of the relationship between research and policy. See Virginia Berridge, 'Making health policy', in Virginia Berridge (ed.), Making health policy: networks in research and policy after 1945, Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi, 2005, pp. 5-36.
25. 'Lessons from history 1; leadership, Dr David Starkey, author, historian and broadcaster', 'Achieving value for patients and the public', NHS Confederation conference, 14-16 June, 2006. An attendee at the conference commented on what a good speaker Starkey was, but could not remember what he had said.
26. Interview with health service representative by Virginia Berridge, 25 July 2006.
27. Loudon, op. cit., note 23 above.
28. Comment to Virginia Berridge at an LSHTM function. Dr Sheard was the book's main author, as I pointed out. Sally Sheard and Liam Donaldson, The nation's doctor: the role of the Chief Medical Officer, Oxford, Radcliffe Publishing, 2006.
29. Interview with chair of expert committee 1 by Virginia Berridge, 18 Jan. 2006.
30. The speech commented that "diseases of affluence" were hardly public health issues at all and were not epidemics in the epidemiological sense. This begs the question of the redefinition of public health after the Second World War.
31. Interview with expert committee chair 2 by Virginia Berridge, 6 March 2006.
32. Among several e-mails I received after the seminar one from a colleague asked me how valid the historical work was.
33. Interview with health service representative by Virginia Berridge, 25 July 2006.
34. One of my informants saw foundation trusts as "rebadged" in this way by analogy with Spain and Sweden, who had taken ideas from the UK in the first place.
35. The same process took place with the recent moves to introduce (in fact to re-introduce) "fixing rooms" into British drug services. This was an idea which had been tried in the 1960s.
36. Neil M Ferguson, Derek A Cummings, Christophe Fraser, James C Cajka, Philip C Colley,
37. Donald S Burke, 'Strategies for mitigating an influenza pandemic', Nature, 2006, 442: 448-52, e-pub ahead of print 26 April.
38. Katrin Gaardbo Kuhn, Diarmid H Campbell-Lendrum, Ben Armstrong and Clive R Davies, 'Malaria in Britain: past, present and future', PNAS, 2003, 100: 9997-10001, originally published online 11 Aug. 2003.
39. Martin Gorsky gave an overview of available data such as Registrar General reports and health statistics to a joint meeting with the environmental research group at LSHTM, 1 March 2007.
40. Presentation by Kelley Lee and Najda Doyle to History Group at LSHTM, 16 March 2006. A researcher scans material in the Guildford tobacco archive and all the researchers writing a paper use that material. An interpretation would be developed but would not be published until all had viewed the same material and had agreed that the interpretation was the correct one. This way of working came about because of the requirements of legal process.
41. E D Balbach and E M Barbeau, 'Beyond quagmires: the evolving quality of documents research', Tobacco Control, 2005, 14: 361-2.
42. House of Commons, session 1999-2000, Health Committee, The tobacco industry and the health risks of smoking, second report, 27-1, London, Stationery Office, vol. 1, report and proceedings of the committee.
43. Discussed in Berridge, op. cit., note 2 above, p. 514.
44. AIDS provided a similar example.
45. Lunchtime seminar at BBC White City attended by David Cannadine, Pat Thane and Virginia Berridge, and organized by Mark Damazer.
46. Including a piece on the smoking ban, in which Virginia Berridge was involved.
47. Interview with speech writer by Virginia Berridge, 7 Nov. 2006.
48. Quentin Skinner speaking at a British Academy meeting on history and public life referred to the role of "public intellectuals" on the French model-these were worth hearing on any topic even if not expert. British Academy seminar, 19 Oct. 2005.
49. Virginia Berridge, AIDS in the UK: the making of policy, 1981-1994, Oxford University Press, 1996.
50. A number of journals are now starting to run historical series on the model of the long running one in the American Journal of Public Health. Some are edited by historians and therefore offer the opportunity to feed in historical discussion.
51. Dr Fiona Godlee, editor of the British Medical Journal, speaking at a conference on the Social Determinants of Health in September 2006, mentioned how much she valued history after a UCL training in the subject. However, her review of research focused on evidence from randomized controlled trials, not from history.
52. Fiona Godlee, 'Milestones on the long road to knowledge', Br, med. J., 2007, 334 (suppl_1): s2 (6 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.39062.570856.94.
53. E-mail from Lesley Lilley, senior policy manager knowledge transfer, ESRC, 1 Aug. 2006.
54. 'Getting research into policy and practice', Wellcome News, Nov. 2007, issue 52, pp. 12-13.
55. Among those in which the Centre for History in Public Health has been involved are: a project on binge drinking funded by the Alcohol Education and Research Council; a study of the childhood leukemia trials funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), and a study of health education literature and what it reveals for the post-war history of public health and future policy directions, funded by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE). The MRC and NICE approached our Centre to carry out this work, a change from normal grant funding mechanisms.
56. Virginia Berridge and Tim Hickman, 'History and the future of psychoactive substances', position paper for Foresight initiative, www.foresight.gov.uk, 2005; Michael Worboys and Abigail Woods, 'Detection of infectious diseases: history review', Foresight, 2006.
57. The Henley Centre is a management think-tank.
58. See Public Health News, 27 March 2006, p. 10.
59. Author's notes of the debate.
60. It was absent from Tony Blair's public health speech which attributed public health improvement in the nineteenth century in part to the benefits of medical research.
61. Interview with health service representative by Virginia Berridge, 25 July 2006.
62. Interview with speech writer by Virginia Berridge, 7 Nov. 2006.
63. See, for example, John Welshman, 'Knights, knaves, pawns and queens: attitudes to behaviour in postwar Britain', J. Epidemiol. Community Health, 2007, 61: 95-7, which takes issue with Julian Le Grand's influential thesis on post-war Britain.
64. Interview with speech writer by Virginia Berridge, 7 Nov. 2006.
65. Interview with policy adviser 1 by Virginia Berridge, 2 March 2006.
66. Interview with policy adviser 2 by Virginia Berridge, 16 May 2006. Virginia Berridge, 'The Black report: reinterpreting history', in Harold J Cook, Sanjoy Battacharya, and Anne Hardy (eds), History of the social determinants of health: global histories, contemporary debates, Hyderabad, Orient Longman, 2008, pp. 111-18.
67. Her comments on it showed she did not understand the concept of change over time: everything was interpreted as if it referred to the present.
68. Sally Sheard and John Welshman in the northwest.
69. www.national school.gov.uk/programmes/index.asp.
70. Peter J Beck, 'History and policy at the Treasury, 1957-76', see History & Policy website: http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-49. html
71. www.historyandpolicy.org.
72. V Berridge, 'Popular journalism and working class attitudes, 1854-1886: a study of Reynolds's Newspaper, Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper and the Weekly Times', University of London, PhD thesis, 1976.
73. 'Historical overview of government health policy', Cooksey review background paper: a brief history of government health research policy, http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/cooksey_review/ cookseyreview_index.cfm.