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6
Perhaps the greatest value was the opportunity this meeting provided
for general practitioners, psychiatrists, social workers, public
health medical officers, nursing staff and others to meet each other
personally and to hear one another's views on a rapidly developing
service.
The National Health Service (Family Planning) Act received the
Royal Assent in June 1967 and this provided us with an opportunity
to strengthen and extend our arrangements for providing a
comprehensive family planning service through the agency of the
Family Planning Association, to whom I would again express our
thanks for their continued help and co-operation. We were able to
introduce and finalise the provisions as permitted by the Act very
quickly and the arrangements are such that women can now obtain
advice on family planning with the maximum of privacy and the
minimum of inconvenience. The year also was notable for the
introduction of a domiciliary family planning team consisting of a
doctor and a nurse who visit households to advise women who, for
one reason or another, are unable or unwilling to attend at the
clinics. As shown later in the Report, this has also been a signal
success. With the introduction of the domiciliary service and the
increase in the number of sessions available at clinics and hospitals,
we can give a very good service in Wandsworth.
Our arrangements for offering a gynaecological screening service
including examination of cervical smears continued and were extended
in 1967. Of particular interest was our offer of facilities to
women employed in the Council's service and to certain hospitals
and also to some of the larger firms in Wandsworth. We made
arrangements with one firm for a team comprising our Senior
Medical Officer in charge of this service and a nurse to visit the
premises and carry out examinations and tests in the factory. This.
I understand, was very greatly appreciated. Statistical details of
the examinations will be found in the Report.
I dealt at length in last year's Report with the means of liaison
between the Health Department, general practitioners and hospitals,
making mention of the so-called attachment schemes by which
Health Department personnel, particularly health visitors, midwives,
home nurses and possibly social workers are attached to
particular medical practices. For reasons which are fully set out
in last year's Report and which need not be repeated, attachment
schemes on a large scale are not easy to introduce in a highly
urbanised area such as Wandsworth. Ideally, the staff should be
attached to a practice, working at and from the same practice
premises as the general practitioners. However, it may well be that
surgery premises may not be large enough to make this possible
and so the second-best arrangement is to site health visitors at the
health clinic premises nearest to their attached doctors. It follows
from this that the health visitors and other staff are decentralized.
In Wandsworth, as I have indicated before, the policy of