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64
REPORT BY THE TUBERCULOSIS OFFICER
(DR. HAMILTON) ON THE WORK OF THE
TUBERCULOSIS DISPENSARY.
Fulham Tuberculosis Dispensary,
Annual Report, 1926.
During the past year alterations have taken place
in the personnel of the Dispensary Staff. Following
on the resignation of Dr. Hewat, in May, Dr. Sullivan
was selected at first temporarily, and later permanently,
to the position of Medical Officer of Health. There
thus ensued an interval of four months before the
post of Tuberculosis Officer was filled, and throughout
this period Dr. Hardy carried on the entire medical
work of the department, single-handed and with
complete success.
Seeing that the department was shorthanded for
more than a third of the period under review, one
would have expected a considerable drop in the
number of cases dealt with, contacts examined,
domiciliary visits paid, etc., but, as a matter of fact,
the decrease has been very slight. Moreover, in a
Borough in which the following-up work has been
so thorough as it has been in Fulham, the natural
tendency would be for the numbers recorded in the
various branches of the report to arrive at a point of
equilibrium, and for the new patients taken on the
books approximately to counterbalance those discharged.
In addition it may be of interest to mention
that during 1925 a memorandum was circularised by
the Ministry of Health, having reference to the mode
of procedure and the keeping of statistics to be
adopted in dispensaries throughout the country. The
scheme set out therein is a complicated one, and one
may be permitted to doubt whether in many respects
it is an improvement on its predecessors, but one of
its main features is that it lays down certain definite
principles regarding the removal of the names of
persons from the Dispensary register whom, for various