In that respect it remains the envy of many countries where the level of healthcare depends largely on the ability to pay.

The NHS has evolved greatly since its formation and different parts of the UK have tailored the basic model to suit their own particular needs.

In Northern Ireland one of the most sensible decisions was to create an integrated health and social services model which enables a more holistic approach to care, even if it is not always delivered. Care in the community remains a work in progress.

Healthcare is not cheap and the NHS consumes huge sums of public money annually. That is a bone of contention. The NHS claims it is underfunded, while critics say too much money goes on administration and not enough on frontline services.

Successive Labour governments in recent years have pumped huge sums of additional funding into it, yet there are still significant deficiencies in delivery of care in various parts of the UK.

However, in Northern Ireland there have also been significant improvements. Waiting lists have dropped. At the end of March this year there were just under 37,000 people waiting for treatment, down by 1,000 on the previous quarter. Only 56 patients had been waiting for more than 21 weeks for inpatient treatment, a huge improvement on the situation in recent years when waits of more than one or even two years were not uncommon.

One headline making difficulty faced by hospitals is the incidence of serious infection on wards. Last year 77 people in Northern Ireland died as a result of C Diff infection, with another 53 deaths so far this year. In the last month alone there have been 22 new cases. Large sums of money have been spent on trying to clean up the wards, but the risk continues.

Bureaucracy within the NHS is a universal point of complaint.

While hospital and community health trusts point out that administration costs are only a fraction of their overall spend, there remains a public perception that the NHS has too many managers.

These posts are often highly paid and when cost cutting becomes necessary it is often frontline workers such as nurses who face the chop.

Any service as large and complex as the NHS will have its deficiencies and the NHS is not exempt from criticism. Yet, what cannot be denied, and what should be valued above all else, is the dedication of the staff, nurses, doctors, those who work in social services or in community care. They provide care of the highest order in the vast majority of cases.

The ultimate test of the NHS is how it treats us when we desperately need it. The verdict must be that it treats us very well in the vast majority of cases and it does so without discrimination on our ability to pay for the specialised care we require. For that reason alone we should raise our glasses in a toast to the NHS on its birthday.