View report page

4
Eastern Metropolitan Hospital Boards. With these services went
the whole of the files and records, so that it is not a practical
possibility to report upon the activities of the Council's scheme for
the first part of the year before the appointed day. After the
appointed day the County Council were fortunately able to arrange
accommodation in the Town Hall for much of the transferred
staff, which is a great convenience to the inhabitants of all but the
most northern part of the district who might otherwise be forced
to make their inquiries in person to the Divisional office in Brook
Drive. This has made the task of day-to-day administration of the
transferred services by your Medical Officer of Health on behalf
of the County Council much easier.
The report will be found, therefore, to deal only with the environmental
services, as these are the only matters with the exception
of epidemic disease for which the Council now have any responsibility.
Broadly, the effect of the National Health Service Act,
1946, has been to take from the local authorities all the work
connected with hospitals, and in effect to nationalise that side of
the work, to take from the local sanitary authorities all the personal
services of preventive medicine and hand them to the major local
authorities, the County Councils and County Borough Councils,
renaming them Local Health Authorities for the purpose and to
leave only the environmental services with the local sanitary
authorities. Unhappily for Public Health, of the 80 sections of the
new Act, a mere twelve deal with preventive medicine, and they
are dwarfed between the two giants for disease treatment, the
Hospital and Specialist Services on the one hand, and the General
Practitioner and ancillary services on the other, with the handicap
and burden of having the duty of providing among other matters
for the nursing and other requirements for cases from both hospitals
and general practitioner nursed at home. In times of stress
obviously preventive medicine staff will be used to supplement
curative nursing staff for whose services weekly payments in
advance have been made by patients who have up till now shown
every intention of getting value for their money.
It seems unlikely that the art of preventive medicine which was
raised to such heights in the war, particularly in Burma, will be
able to hold its true place in promoting the welfare of the people
until the swing of the pendulum brings prevention to the foreground
to take its rightful place in front of that which treatment of disease
new occupies so prominently.
The health of the borough as indicated by the statistics to be
found in the report has not suffered in the least as the result of the
transfer of services which, considering the extent of the change, is