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7
ization has been the practice for a great many years. Groups of
health visitors have their offices in various local health authority
premises distributed throughout the area. In this way, the health
visitor groups working in a given area become "linked", as it
were, with that area and by implication with other health and
medical workers such as general practitioners also working in that
area. They become familiar with the particular public health and
social problems in the area where they work and also familiar
with each other's problems, and although they may be linked with
the doctors working in the same area as themselves, the doctors
need not necessarily be in partnership or in group practice. This
linkage scheme as it applies to an area like Wandsworth may even
have some advantages over attachment schemes. Thus, as has been
said, a group of health visitors become aware of the problems of
their particular area and familiar with and able to work with the
doctors in that area so that if one particular health visitor happens
not to be available, her colleagues, knowing her problems, will be
able to deputize for her. Linkage is also probably more economic
in terms of staff time, including travelling time, than attachment,
a factor of paramount importance in face of staff shortages. While
there seems to be little doubt that with the likely growth of group
practices and more practices being undertaken from health centres,
full-scale attachment schemes are likely to increase, it seems to me
that linkage schemes such as we have in Wandsworth can and do
perform a very useful function of little less value than attachment
schemes, and with fewer disadvantages.
In pursuance of this policy, we have given much thought to
whether this idea of linkage could be extended to the Home Nursing
Service and have achieved some degree of success in the sense that
already groups of home nurses do work in particular areas of
Wandsworth corresponding approximately to those of the health
visitors. I hope we can extend this and eventually have a complete
linkage of home nurses as there is for health visitors.
At the end of the year, St. Teresa's Hospital in Wimbledon
ceased to admit National Health Service maternity patients. This
followed the opening of the new Maternity Unit at Queen Mary's
Hospital, Roehampton, which now takes all maternity cases
formerly admitted to St. Teresa's. Although the new Unit did not
begin to function in 1967, having accepted the first patients on
1st January, 1968, I refer to it here because the inauguration of a
new purpose-built modern maternity unit in conjunction with a
teaching hospital can hardly fail to have advantages to mothers
and babies in Wandsworth and I am glad to say that close links
and liaison were quickly established between our own staff of
domiciliary midwives and health visitors on the one hand and their
colleagues in the Roehampton Unit on the other. A further
advantage is that the organization of a mobile resuscitation unit
or "flying squad" based on the Hospital will provide much