View report page

5
Health Service Act, should not lag behind the development of the
estate but, in fact, should have been established to meet the foreseeable
need. To-day the trend of medicine is developing towards
treatment, hospitalisation and specialisation, less attention being
given to true prevention. It is cheaper to prevent than it is to
cure. The time, too, has arrived when a re-orientation of
thought should be given to the type of services that should be
rendered under health services. We continue to exercise a
model of a service set up some thirty years ago. What was
needed and good in those early years is not necessarily good for
the present age. Centralisation of government tends to operate
to a pattern and not to take into consideration local need and
local circumstances. The functions of a Local District Council
Health Department require to be extended, for example, to bring
under the notification of diseases, all diseases that are communicable
to man or transmittable to man. We tend to overlook
diseases such as, canicola fever, "Q" fever, Bornholm's disease,
Weils disease, glandular fever, etc., while we continue to exercise
our activities in the control of diseases which have been common
to the country for many years. To exercise this control and to
exercise prevention one must have a complete knowledge and
early notification. When staff, such as nursing staff or health
visiting staff are not under the Department's control, it is
difficult to maintain all those operations that we would wish to
put into force. There is need, too, to bring the General
Practitioner more actively into the preventive service. It may
well be necessary in the near future to appoint an infectious
disease nurse, especially if the common diseases such as measles
and whooping cough become more virulent than they have been
in the past few years. There is a growing tendency for the
public to treat these diseases as of little importance but there
is no guarantee that their virulence may not increase in the near
future. Scarlet Fever and its allied diseases have, fortunately,
remained mild in character. Diphtheria has disappeared from
our returns but it is still possible that in spite of intensive
diphtheria immunisation it may again raise its ugly head.
It is of vital importance that every Health Department
should be on the alert and so organised that immediate action
can be taken in the event of an outbreak of acute infectious
disease, such as smallpox, arising in the district.
The visit of the mass x-ray unit to Chislehurst and Sidcup
in the early part of the year received welcome support from the
public. This is a service which needs extension and is one that
is, in fact, truly preventive because it "picks up" the early
stages of the disease and allows such cases to receive early and
effective treatment before the disease can develop into a crippling
catastrophe.
There is far too great a tendency to-day to judge the