[Report 1963] / Medical Officer of Health, West Sussex County Council.

  • John Joseph William Neuner
Date:
1963
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1963] / Medical Officer of Health, West Sussex County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    8/200 (page 8)
    Many local authorities (including West Sussex) have begun to play their part in starting the transformation which will be required. In the belief that further economy and improved performance of the domi¬ ciliary services depend upon the emergence of the family doctor as the leader and director of the medical auxiliary staff and other resources made available by the local health authority, the County Council have begun to give vigorous and generous support to the services provided for the public by general medical practitioners. This is exemplified in the action taken by the Council to attach health visitors to general prac¬ tice groups (now common in most of the urban areas of the County); in the growing use of the computer to manage vaccination and im¬ munisation procedures and in the liberal provision now being made of home nursing equipment of many kinds. “But of technical advance in general practice there is little sign — and for the simple reason that we have not yet found a means within our terms of reference to bring about an industrial revolution for the general prac¬ titioner. The Health Centre was intended to provide this grouping and technical support, but the idea has not yet got off the ground. The general practitioner is excluded from the hospital, so he continues to operate at cottage industry level, under-financed in terms of capital equipment and auxiliary support. At the same time a deep and widespread feeling exists that the personal relationship and responsibility for continuity of care which our system of general practice permits is something worth preserving. Our task is to reconcile the social advantages of general practice v/ith technical advance. Until we do this, our services outside the hospital will be below the potential of which they are capable, and will continually require support from the hospital to compensate for this.”(3> Any opportunities which may be discovered or created whereby closer working and hence more effective partnership with general prac¬ tice can be brought about will be examined as they occur and one obvious possibility may be to think in terms of the new health clinics to be provided in Horsham and Chichester as Health Centres providing common bases for local health authority and general practitioner service. Exhortations to better performance are not enough. The general practitioners are individual entrepreneurs in contract with the Executive Council and they have neither the capital nor the administrative organis¬ ation to make rearrangements of this kind possible. I hope that the County Council may provide the stimulus which is at present lacking. Developments in other directions were disappointing; in particular, progress in the acquisition of some building sites was lamentably slow. Although after two years of parley agreement was reached by the Group Hospital Management Committee, the Regional Hospital Board and the County Council, no final decision was made about the sale of a piece of land required for an ambulance station at Bognor Regis and at the end of the year the ball was squarely in the court of the Ministry of Health. A similar period of negotiation with no different outcome was ex¬ perienced over a site needed for ambulance and mental health purposes on hospital land at Chichester and another local public enquiry (follow¬ ing a similar investigation in 1962) had to be held by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government at Crawley where the County Council proposed to erect a training centre for the mentally subnormal on a site adjoining a primary school.