The Health Services
1944-05 1944 1940s 23 pages 11 (e) Between the two types of hospital. Hospitals often compete with one another, and do not form a unified service. Indeed, there is a complete lack of co-ordination even between hospitals of the same type. (f) Between the G.P. and other health services. The general...
| 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/10796/5653B008-1018-458D-B2B1-1C913744ACDA http://hdl.handle.net/10796/E94B52BE-CEB2-4BAE-A8A4-FA75AC46FB69 |
| Summary: | 1944-05
1944
1940s
23 pages
11 (e) Between the two types of hospital. Hospitals often compete with one another, and do not form a unified service. Indeed, there is a complete lack of co-ordination even between hospitals of the same type. (f) Between the G.P. and other health services. The general practitioner is isolated from other general practitioners, from consultants and specialists, from hospitals, from public health and ancillary services (nurses, health visitors, social workers). He knows comparatively little about the patient's home conditions, and still less about his conditions of work. He has no training in social medicine, and is cut off from the preventive public and industrial health services. (g) Between health education and education generally. Health education has been extended during the war, but it should be an integral part of education. Like all the public health services, it varies in extent and quality in different parts of the country. Its approach is rather that of a maiden aunt, and it makes no appeal to the public's own initiative. 2. — Stranglehold of Money — (a) Over entry to the medical profession. Medicine as a career is reserved to the well-to-do. There are very few medical scholarships. As a result, medical men can have, at best, only a theoretical understanding of the conditions of life of the large majority of their patients ; and many brilliant men are denied to the profession through lack of means. (b) Over choice of a specialist's career. A doctor who undertakes the career of consultant and specialist must be in a position to do many years of unpaid work in voluntary hospitals, by means of which he gains his experience and builds up the reputation which may later bring him a high income in private practice. (c) Over the geographical distribution of doctors. This is determined not by need, but by other factors which are mainly economic. In health resorts, where well-to-do patients gather, there are two or three times as many doctors as in slum districts, where health conditions are bad, and a particularly high proportion of doctors is needed. Specialists are concentrated in large numbers in Harley Street, and a few other places, while large country areas are entirely without them. In 1938 there were 142 doctors per 100,000 of the population in London, as against 79 in the provinces and 76 in Wales.
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| Physical Description: | TEXT |