Eleventh report from the Select Committee on Estimates : together with the minutes of evidence taken before sub-committee E and appendices, session 1950-1951: regional hospital boards and hospital management committees.
- Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Select Committee on Estimates
- Date:
- [1951]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Eleventh report from the Select Committee on Estimates : together with the minutes of evidence taken before sub-committee E and appendices, session 1950-1951: regional hospital boards and hospital management committees. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![[Continued. concerned with _ this. We should not, therefore, seek to worry you again, per- haps, for some little time, though un- doubtedly the information we get in the light of those enquiries will lead us to ‘ask you further questions in due course. We are very grateful indeed to you for your memorandum and for coming here today, and we will let you know in due course whether we require any further in- formation apart from what we have asked you today, and when we would lke to put further questions to you?—At that stage might there be some way by which we could be told what the various bodies you have examined have said, so that we may be prepared the better to give evidence to you? iol. We will certainly bear mind?—-Thank you. that in Chairman.] You will, of course, be supplied with a report of today’s proceed- ings, and if you would mark any para- graph as “Confidential” or otherwise, appropriate action will be taken. Mr. Alexander Anderson. Mr. Diamond. Mr. J. Enoch Powell. Mr. Thomas Reid. Miss Ward. called in and examined. Chairman. 162. We are very much obliged to you for coming here this morning and for having prepared this very full memoran- dum* for us. I think perhaps it is right to tel! you at the outset that we are a Sub- Committee of the Estimates Committee, that we are investigating the Estimates for the hospital and specialist services, and that we are of course concerned with policy questions but not so much high policy, which we have to accept, as the day to day policy and the proper expenditure of the money which is voted hy Parliament. I do not know whether there is anything you would like to say in amplification of your memorandum or in explanation of any part of it before we ask specific ques- tions?—(Dr. Rowland Hill.) 1 think per- heps the matter which is uppermost in the minds of consultants employed in the Hospital Service to-day, and one is think- ing of this from the point of view of * Annex 2. the cost of the Service, is the danger that appears to us to be increasing almost week by week of over-centralisation of the administration and control in the Hospital Service. We were all brought up in the days when an individual hospital controlled itself; if it had a personality of its own, a tradition of its own. We have become conscious, since the appointed day, of more and more almost day to day decisions in hospital administration becoming more and more centralised, and at the present time we are very apprehensive of the increasing concern with day to day administration of the Ministry of Health in Whitehall. If I may just give one example of that. there is the growing tendency of Whitehall! itself to decide the medical establishment of a hospital even right out at the peri- phery. With our lives being spent in hospitals it makes us feel very appte- hensive of the efficiency of such a procedure and of its ultimate economy. My colleague Professor Cloake might like to amplify vhat I have said by expressing any views of his own.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32182478_0052.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
