[Report 1958] / Medical Officer of Health and School Medical Officer of Health, East Riding of Yorkshire County Council.

  • East Riding of Yorkshire (England). County Council
Date:
1958
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1958] / Medical Officer of Health and School Medical Officer of Health, East Riding of Yorkshire County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    5/96 (page 1)
    To the Chairman and Members of the County Council. Sir John Dunnington-Jefferson, My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have the honour to present my Annual Reports on the General and School Health Services for the year 1958. In view of the fact that during this year the National Health Service became ten years old, the Minister of Health has asked that I should make a brief general review of the manner in which during these ten years the local health services have functioned in the wider setting of the National Health Service generally. The adequate functioning of the local health services in this wider setting of the National Health Service depends, of course, on the degree of co-operation and community of interest which can be obtained between the various sections. This objective of collabora- tion with the Hospital and Specialist .Services on the one hand and the General Practitioner Service on the other, has been kept i constantly in mind and applied whenever possible, and the need for it has been frequently referred to in previous Annual Reports. So far as the general practitioners are concerned, this collabora- tion was helped a great deal when, in 1953, the Local Medical Committee agreed to set up a Study Group to study the Local Health Authority Services from the general practitioners’ stand- point. The report which was prepared by this Study Group was i eventually circulated to every general practitioner in the County ; and helped very considerably in the achievement of mutual under- i standing. One good result has been the establishment of a Liaison Committee made up of representative general practitioners and the 1 four Divisional Medical Officers and myself; this committee meets ! at regular intervals to deal with matters of mutual interest. The Study Group on another occasion gave detailed consideration to I the Hospital Service, again from the point of view of the general 1 practitioners, but many matters affecting Local Health Authority Services also came up for consideration and this has happened again ] recently when the. Group met to discuss the Geriatric Service. The link between the Countv Health Services, which are mostly medico-social in nature, is closer with the general practitioners than 1 with the hospitals and specialists, as these latter tend to seek the provision of social services through the patient4s normal medical practitioner rather than directly from the Local Health Authority. General practitioners have, of course, daily, occasion to use the help provided by the domiciliary nursing and midwifery service and the ambulance service. More recently, increasing use is being made by practitioners of the help that can be rendered to them by health visitors, and this applies especially where a health visitor’s area is not served by very many practices. Practitioners are, of course, participating in the vaccination and immunisation scheme and they are making more use of the domestic help service as each