A national health service : the White Paper proposals in brief.

Date:
1944
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A national health service : the White Paper proposals in brief. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    (though not exclusively) that they will first be started. It will then be possible to watch the development, with the profession, and to decide in the light of experience how far and how fast a change over to this form of practice should be made. Grouped practice and Heaith Centres ‘The conception of grouped practice finds its most usual expression in the idea, advocated by the Medical Planning Commission and others, of conducting practice in specially designed and equipped premises where the group can collaborate and share up-to-date resources—the idea of the Health Centre. The Government agree that in this form the advantages of the group system can be most fully realised, though it will also be desirable to encourage grouped practice without special premises. They intend to design the new service so as to give full scope to the Health Centre system. The design of a Health Centre will provide for individual consulting- rooms, reception and waiting-rooms, simple laboratory work,. nursing and secretarial staff, telephone services and other accessories, as well as—in varying degree according to circumstances—dark rooms, facilities for minor surgery and other ancillaries. The object will be to provide doctors with first-class premises and equipment and assistance and so give them the best facilities for meeting their patients’ needs and saving their own time. Health Centres will not affect the patient’s freedom to employ the doctor of his choice : he will be equally free to choose his doctor, whether in a Health Centre, in grouped practice outside the Centre or in separate practice. Nor will the fact that a doctor is practising in a Health Centre mean that he will not visit his patient at home, when required, just as he does now. Each Centre will need to be so planned as to be regarded by patients, not as a complete break with present habit, but as a new place at which they can continue, if they wish, to see their own doctor in better equipped surroundings. Alternatively, they must be able, if they prefer it, simply to choose their Centre rather than any particular doctor in it ; and then the Centre’s arrange- ments must be such as to ensure that they are afforded all the proper advice and treatment there which they may need. In England and Wales the Centres will normally be provided and maintained by county and county borough councils. The provision - and distribution will be in accordance with a general plan for the operation in the area of the National Health Service as a whole. How this plan will be prepared is described later, but it will be drawn up in consultation with the medical profession and approved by the Minister. The wish of local doctors to bring their work into the Centres must obviously be a big factor in a decision to provide a Centre, but in the last resort the decision will rest on the public interest. In Scotland, where the scale of the problem is smaller, the provision and maintenance of Centres will be a central responsibility of the Secretary of State, who will have power to delegate his functions to a local authority where, after an initial experimental period, this is shown to be desirable.
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