Private complaints and public health : Richard Titmuss on the National Health Service

Richard Titmuss was one of the twentieth century's foremost social policy theorists.

This accessible Reader is the first compendium of his work on public health, health promotion and health inequalities.

Most of Titmuss's work has been out of print for many years.

This volume, like its predecessor, Welfare and wellbeing (The Policy Press, 2001), is important in bringing the work of this highly influential thinker to the attention of a new generation of social policy students and policy makers.

It also enhances current debates about how complex societies can best provide for the health of all their citizens.

The themes with which the book deals are of huge contemporary relevance and include: the differences between private and public health care systems; relationships between health care provision and the values underlying social policy; debates between health care 'experts' and consumers; health and social inequalities; personal and social meanings of health.

Commentaries by leading experts in the field draw out these themes and make explicit links between Titmuss's work and key issues of concern in health policy today. Private complaints and public health is essential reading for students of social policy and health, policy makers and planners in the health service, analysts of health care and social policy, and for historians with a particular interest in the origins of the NHS.