NHS Networks is where clinicians, managers, leaders, innovators, board members, policy makers, as well as patients and communities can all contribute to - and learn from - new thinking and new practice.

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On this morning's Woman's Hour, a former teacher related the story of how when she wrote to let the school know that she was pregnant, her employer wrote back thanking her for her resignation letter. That was in 1962.

In 1964, the Minister of Transport was asked whether he planned to add further non-smoking carriages on London Underground trains. It took a further 23 years and the tragedy of the King's Cross Fire before smoking was finally banned across the Underground network.

In 1968, Dr Martin Luther King, leader of the American Civil Rights movement, was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee. But for a bullet it would have been entirely possible for Dr King to have lived long enough to see his dream realised. He would have turned 80 in the year that Barack Obama became the first black president of the United States of America.

What these examples show is the power of the collective action to bring about enormous change within remarkably short periods. Feminism, civil rights and public health have all advanced not through the actions of governments but through the actions of individuals acting together. People start movements. If it has any sense, government policy follows.

In its own far more modest way NHS Networks represents the same spirit of collective action: the desire to share, to get together with other like-minded people, to discover better ways of doing things and to be a force for good.

So as the NHS enters its seventh decade, it is a fitting time to welcome the NHS Constitution, a document that enshrines not just the right of patients to healthcare, which they already hold, but the new right to be consulted about the NHS services they want and need.

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