British healthcare before 1945 included localized forms of social provision. Poor-law institutions, councils, doctors' clinics and charities all contributed. Small clinics could contain a few hospital beds rather than operating as large centralized hospitals. The NHS brought existing systems together and built its organization around that combination. Wartime coordination also enters the account, alongside the difficulty of combining institutions with different origins.
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The institutions brought together to create the NHS
Earlier local and charitable arrangements help explain the NHS's inherited organizational layers.