The Health Services
1944-05 1944 1940s 23 pages 9 (4) The Home Doctor. The position of the general practitioner, the traditional family doctor, has become extremely difficult. He is the most important factor in every health service, but in a world where pooling of resources, team work and organised effort have been...
| Institution: | MCR - The Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick |
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| Language: | English English |
| Published: |
London : C. W. Publishing Ltd.
May 1944
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10796/F35B34AC-C9F7-427D-844C-383B87891DB7 http://hdl.handle.net/10796/936696FB-FE16-4BA7-B2E7-E3D208A781AB |
| Summary: | 1944-05
1944
1940s
23 pages
9 (4) The Home Doctor. The position of the general practitioner, the traditional family doctor, has become extremely difficult. He is the most important factor in every health service, but in a world where pooling of resources, team work and organised effort have been recognised as urgent necessities, he has remained an isolated unit and is compelled to rely mostly on his own resources. He plays the dual role of professional and business man, whether he likes it or not. He starts his professional career with a heavy financial burden, for he has to begin by buying a practice at the price of one or one-and-a-half year's income. In the majority of cases he has to borrow the money, and it may take him ten years or more to pay off his debt. The length of the time may depend not so much on the amount of work he does, as on the financial position of his patients. His practice will probably consist of panel and private patients. His panel will provide him with an income which will be steady but low. Some of his private patients will be dependants of his panel patients with little money to spare for medical attention. Whether he can earn a good income will depend on his well-to-do fee-paying patients. As a professional man the general practitioner is expected to give equal service to all his patients. As a business man, he must pay off his debt and make his practice pay, in order to provide for himself and his family and for his old age. So he is torn between these two incompatible considerations, and if he chooses the line of least resistance, it will probably be the professional side of his life which will suffer. In addition, he encounters practical difficulties in the professional field. He cannot make available to his patients all the resources of modern medicine because he is isolated, ill-equipped and there are financial barriers between himself and his patients. As he is usually overworked and has little or no clerical or nursing assistance, he can only devote an average of a few minutes to each patient. His medical work is often not of as high a standard as it should be because he has no time for studies to keep him up to date with medical developments. Most of these difficulties are generally admitted, and as a remedy, the establishment of group practice in properly equipped health centres, where general practitioners work in teams with other health workers, and where all the health services of a locality are brought together, has been widely advocated, and is proposed, somewhat tentatively, in the White Paper.
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| Physical Description: | TEXT |