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out their work with all the help which is commonly available at a Clinic,
and when I am asked how soon I think this will be established in Barking
1 do not make very hopeful remarks because, apart from an experimental
Centre happening to be built here, I do not think we are likely to have
one for many years.
It is my opinion that we require five such Health Centres in Barking
with such additional Centres as may be necessary if parts of the town,
which are not at present built up, should become housing estates, and I
cannot see how we could do with one less. With five Centres I think
that one more centrally placed than the other should be a special Centre
with fuller facilities than the other Centres to aid in diagnosis and treatment.
For instance, I cannot see the scope of treatment personally carried
out in your Physiotherapy Unit at Manor School being reproduced at
other Health Centres; contrariwise, I believe that this would have to be
centralised in a main Health Centre.
One inherent difficulty is, of course, that general practitioners would
want to practise from several of these Centres, perhaps some of them
outside Barking, that is if they are to cope with their present wide-flung
panel of patients. I cannot see that Health Centres are going to be highly
successful until the practice of any one general practitioner is more or
less limited to the area served by the Centre at which he practises. There
are other personal and professional difficulties so far as the man in private
practice (who practises from his own house) is concerned, and I feel that
it will only be as the young men enter practice that the general custom
will grow up of running general practice from Health Centres.
I have felt for many years that a very real step forward would be to
allow medical officers to undertake domiciliary medicine. This would be
a small beginning, but I believe it would grow as our other services have
grown in response to public demand, and I still believe that we shall
have the opportunity of fostering Health Centre practice in this way.
CLINIC SERVICES
There have been no extensions to public clinic services in Barking
during the year, but negotiations were continued for improvements to
be effected in clinic accommodation, viz.:
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