Report : 1931 / Middlesex Hospital.

  • Middlesex Hospital
Date:
1931
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report : 1931 / Middlesex Hospital. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    we have made a beginning with the final section of the Hospital. The foundations and retaining walls are finished and the steel framework is rising. We have the money to pay for them, and, since nothing succeeds like success, I cannot believe that we shall not receive, in large sums or small, what we yet need to complete the whole great undertaking. But in another way, possibly of even greater importance, the close relations between all those who serve the Hospital has been of the utmost value. You know how, under the Local Government Act of 1929/30 the old Poor Law Infirmaries were handed over to the L.C.C. and became Municipal Hospitals. The L.C.C., justly proud of their immense and exceedingly efficient organisation, whose Budget exceeds that of many of the smaller nations of the world, have made great progress with their plans for bringing up to date the Hospitals under their care. We shall soon, I hope, see the whole standard of treatment and nursing raised to the level of the best of them. With the same process going on throughout the country, Great Britain will shortly have a national health service incomparably better than any other in the world. The Act which effected this change enjoined on the Local Authorities the necessity for co-operation with the Voluntary Hospitals, to increase efficiency and prevent overlapping. Public Health Committees were set up and relations established between the two systems. In the provinces this was generally more easy to do than in London, for there the same people who direct the Voluntary Hospitals are often also on the Local Authority, and, in any case, have personal knowledge of the needs of their districts. In London it is different. The L.C.C. deals with an enormous area and population, and a great number of Hospitals, both of the general type and for fever and mental diseases. The attempt to correlate services is complicated by the presence in London of 12 great Teaching Hospitals which do not necessarily draw even a majority of their patients from the L.C.C. area, but which do supply the medical men to staff the L.C.C. Hospitals, and in their special clinics render services to the public which the Municipal Hospitals do not, at any rate as yet, supply. You must bear in mind that the Teaching Hospitals and the few special hospitals which it is necessary for their students to visit are quite different from the rest of the Voluntary Hospitals in London, both in their services and in their needs, if you are to realise how much more complicated negotiations are in London than in the provinces. In Manchester, for instance, the City Council has already arranged that cases which are of particular interest to students shall be transferred
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