160 volunteers recorded over 2,400 interviews with over 1,200 people on their lived experience of the NHS - as patients, staff and members of the public in an oral history project run by the University of Manchester. Professor Stephanie Snow discusses the way these help us understand how caring for children has changed in the NHS, what it felt like to get health care and not have to pay for it and other stories which interviews with policy makers in the archives didn't reveal. The Voices of Our National Health service is held at the British Library and a book has been published Our Stories: 75 Years of the NHS from the People who Built it, Lived it and Love it
https://www.nhs70.org.uk/story/voices-our-national-health-service-nhs
https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2021/07/the-nhs-at-73.html
Film maker Sara David talks about NHS Untold Film Stories and her documentary Khichdi which focuses on three Indian women, including the filmmaker’s mother, who trained together in India, became friends and came to work as nurses in the NHS in the 1990s
You can find out more about her film and others which have been funded in this article https://www.ukri.org/news/next-generation-of-filmmakers-to-tell-nhs-untold-film-stories/
and you can find more archive films here
https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/collection/nhs-on-film
Dr Sarah Jilani is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker who is a Lecturer in English at City, University of London
This New Thinking conversation is part of a series marking NHS75 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. If you don’t want to miss an episode sign up for the BBC Arts & Ideas podcast from BBC Sounds.
