Health Service or "Panel"
1945 1945 1940s 4 pages Briefly, the structure strikes at the White Paper in the following ways:— (1) It attempts to separate the Health Service from Social Security (National Insurance), ignoring the intimate link between health and social conditions. (2) It suggests that all we are to ha...
| Institution: | MCR - The Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick |
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| Language: | English English |
| Published: |
London : Socialist Medical Association
[1945?]
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10796/78E65B80-861B-45BB-962C-DE191817FFBA http://hdl.handle.net/10796/D7C387EA-3751-46DC-BCA7-6C785BB1340A |
| Summary: | 1945
1945
1940s
4 pages
Briefly, the structure strikes at the White Paper in the following ways:— (1) It attempts to separate the Health Service from Social Security (National Insurance), ignoring the intimate link between health and social conditions. (2) It suggests that all we are to have is a development of the National Health Insurance, by the addition of specialist care and an extension to more of the population, but all the inequalities of the "panel" are to be perpetuated and, indeed, intensified. There would result a strengthening of vested interests and the creation of new barriers to further development. (3) It removes public control through Joint Authorities and hands it to (a) Regional Councils on which local authorities would be in a minority of 4 to 11; (b) Area Planning Councils on which the local authorities would have a theoretical majority of 18 to 12 but on which the balance of political power in the hands of the elected representatives of the people would be upset by the co-option of medical representatives in their own right; (c) Hospital Planning Groups on which it is suggested local authorities would be in a minority of 1 to 2 in spite of the fact that they already provide two-thirds of the hospital beds; (d) Local Committees for G.P. service on which local authority representatives would be approximately 10 to 20; (e) the whole crowned by a Central Health Services Council on which local authorities for the whole country would have 3 out of 37 members. (4) The setting-up of Health Centres is to be made as difficult as possible and their success prevented by every possible device. As now envisaged Health Centres are to be set up as "a centrally controlled experiment" though the local authorities "will provide and maintain them including ancillary staff" ... but there will be no question of any contract of employment between the local authority and doctors, so that competition between doctors would persist, and competition between Centres might even develop. It is particularly sinister that in a document sent to local authorities and purporting to place before them the same proposals as are to be considered by the B.M.A., no mention is made of health centres or of the idea that the local authority should provide them but not control the doctors working in them. Medical Bureaucracy This B.M.A./Willink document gives a diagram of the suggested "alternative administrative structure" and it reveals a complication beside which our present "complicated patch-work pattern of health resources," as the White Paper called them, is simplicity and clarity combined. A single proposal for an improvement might have to be considered by nine different committees, most of which would have direct access to the Minister. Bureaucracy is bad when the people allow it to assume powers they themselves should hold. This proposed medical bureaucracy would be outside the control of the people and would destroy the principle so admirably set out by the White Paper, that the provision of so vital a service as that for health must be "the clear responsibility" of the elected representatives of the people. The previous weakness of the White Paper on the subject of private practice is intensified by the proposal that a patient may "transfer at any
292/847/3/59 |
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| Physical Description: | TEXT |