View report page

INTRODUCTION
Ministry of Health Circular 2/62 dated the 23rd January, 1962, requested local
authorities to review their health and welfare services and to draw up a ten-year
development plan. The contents of the plan, including the forecast of the cost, were
to be revised annually and on each occasion taken a year further forward so that
it always covered the decade ahead.
The hospital plan for England and Wales was sent with Circular 2/62 for
information, so that its contents could be taken into account when the ten-year
plan for developing the former L.C.C.'s health and welfare services was drawn up.
The Minister stressed the complementary nature of expected developments in
hospital and local authority services.
Ministry of Health Circular 14/65 dated the 30th July, 1965 asked the
Council to review its ten year plan (or those of its predecessors) in the light of their
growing experience of the needs of the different services. The form of summary
requested the Council (a) to include in the revision of the ten-year plan, a programme
for the care of the elderly and mentally disordered (b) to cover the ten
years 1966/67 to 1975/76 (information about the current year 1965/66 was required
as a starting point only, not as part of the revised plan) and (c) to plan on the basis
of existing boundaries. The summary had to be set out year by year for the first
five years (1966/67 to 1970/71), but the second quinquennium (1971/72 to 1975/76)
had to be treated as a single period.
The presentation of any plan for the Council or the Ministry of Health at
that time presented major problems. Because part of health divisions 7 and 8 of
the former L.C.C. were joined to form the new area of the Health Department of
the London Borough of Southwark (Bermondsey, Camberwell and Southwark
areas), comparable statistics, staff numbers and financial expenditure were not available
for 1964/65.
The work of many officers covers more than one service; for example, health
visitors are concerned with health visiting, maternity and child welfare, vaccination
and immunisation, and school health services. These and other officers' salaries
had to be allocated, as had the expenditure for joint-user premises. A further complication
was the volume of services being undertaken by this Borough for other
Boroughs and, of course, services provided by neighbouring Boroughs for us.
This inter-dependence was to be reduced as quickly as possible but definite plans
could not be suggested for 1966/67 or even for the remaining part of 1965/66.
The Council's own five-year plan ensured that all available resources would be
deployed in accordance with a system of priorities and, most important, enabled
available monies to be allocated to the more urgent projects.
In the planning and usage of establishments for the personal health services,
the former L.C.C. did not of course consider metropolitan borough boundaries nor
indeed was it essential to consider the boundaries of the nine health divisions into
which the administrative county was divided: further, for many years financial
11