The Health Services White Paper : The Labour Party's policy
1944-09 1944 1940s 22 pages - 19 - One thing is certain, however. With the coming of a national health service, industrial medical officers in the employ of private firms are an anomaly which must cease. The industrial medical service must be planned and run by the Government. The part-time work o...
| Institution: | MCR - The Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick |
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| Language: | English English |
| Published: |
September 1944
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10796/9F449CBC-CD5B-4D54-B15B-367A78303F1A http://hdl.handle.net/10796/CDD8F027-F75D-4144-A729-DA3C5B78E94F |
| Summary: | 1944-09
1944
1940s
22 pages
- 19 - One thing is certain, however. With the coming of a national health service, industrial medical officers in the employ of private firms are an anomaly which must cease. The industrial medical service must be planned and run by the Government. The part-time work of many general practitioners will be needed. So it is vital that special post-graduate training facilities in this subject must be made available to general practitioners. And no G.P.s who have not been so trained, should take part in the service. 7. The Nursing Services in General. It is certain that a complete health service will call for a very greatly expanded nursing service. Unless pay and conditions of work are greatly improved, it may be hard to find the necessary recruits. A full discussion of the problems involved would be out of place here. But the Labour Party makes the following proposals, which would go a long way to put matters right:- 1. No barriers should be placed in the way of nurses wishing to live out of hospital. Maintenance payments should be based not on the cost of keeping nurses in institutions, but on the current costs of food, and accommodation etc., outside. 2. Married nurses without children or with older children should be encouraged to return to nursing, and should be eligible for senior posts, while living at their own homes. 3. The salary ranges for sisters doing ward and clinical work should be at least as favourable as those for sisters doing administrative work. At present, those who choose to continue with practical nursing rather then take up administration are penalised financially. 4. All unnecessary restrictions in nursing institutions should be abolished. 5. All institutions employing nurses should have a democratically elected nurses' advisory committee. 6. The practice of staffing hospitals cheaply with student nurse labour should cease. Hospitals with schools of nursing should have much larger trained staffs so that student nurses may devote much more time to training and much less to routine ward work. 7. Larger domestic staffs should be the rule in hospitals. 8. Medical Education. The White Paper makes no attempt to cover medical education. Yet since it is the key to the whole future of the health services, the Labour Party feels it right to lay down the following fundamental principles:- 1. At present, there are too few doctors. The setting up of a comprehensive health service for all will make the situation much more acute. 2. At present, it costs approximately £1,500 for a young man or woman to train as a doctor. As long as this is so, only the upper and middle classes can afford to make their children doctors - and shortage of numbers is inevitable. 3. It follows that medical education should be open to all classes, regardless of their financial situation. And with this greatly enlarged pool to draw from, the standard for admission to training and for qualification could be made much more severe.
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| Physical Description: | TEXT |