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121
SECTION IV
PERSONAL HEALTH AND RELATED SERVICES
Traditionally, local government has been structured to carry
out pre-determined tasks and departments have tended to be
organised on these lines with a result that many have become
somewhat hide-bound in outlook. Such situations have stimulated
the adoption of "corporate planning," a method of control which
seeks to break down sectional barriers and to provide solutions
to problems identified not by departments but by the authority
itself. In practice this has produced, at the centre and by the
centre, an organisation better equipped to deal with hard
statistical data than the softer, delicate and diverse problems of
public feeling and opinion. However, it is not out of statistical
analysis, useful though this may be, but within the environment
that problems arise, the "learning" of which takes place at the
periphery. It is unfortunate but, by the very nature of complex
organisations, the numerous levels of command develop a penchant
for filtering out ideas born of empiricism and they become
progressively unresponsive as procedures inevitably become more
rigid. Indeed, there are now indications that we are becoming
more obsessed with the smooth running of the engine and paying
less regard to the direction in which the ship is heading.
Personal reactions to set circumstances are notoriously unpredictable,
a fact which has always militated against detailed
planning of future services concerning basic human affairs.
Statistical analyses and assessments provide useful "guide lines"
but success in such a field is to be found rather in prudent
application of wise counsel than in slavish adherence to depersonalising
mathematical formulae.
Wisdom, a quality of inestimable value in any sphere of life,
is indispensable if public health and personal services are to be
successfully implemented. Such a quality is not adventitious, it
does not arrive overnight nor is it secured merely by erudition.
Rather is it the faculty, founded on knowledge but born of long
experience, to judge and act rightly in any particular case. It is,
indeed, a product of evolution not revolution and, in combination
with a wider, looser planning concept, together with a
modicum of "vision", there is little that cannot be accomplished.
Such was the reasoning underlying the Health Department's
undoubted success. Many of its services, empirically based and