View report page

3
To the Mayor, Aldermen and
Councillors of the Borough of Ealing.
Mr. Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to submit my first Annual Report to you,
this being for the year 1948. I took up the duties of Medical
Officer of Health on the 5th April, 1948, and on the 5th July, 1948,
a great change took place in the Health Services of the whole
country, as on that day, as we well know, the National Health
Service Act, 1946, took effect and the administration of the personal
health services passed from the local Councils to the County Councils
and the hospitals to the Regional Hospital Boards.
The year 1948, therefore, saw the dismemberment of the
Ealing Borough Council's health services. The Perivale Maternity
Hospital, which had a national reputation as a near perfect small
maternity home, and the Clayponds Isolation Hospital, which was
a model of efficient yet economical hospital administration, were
transferred on the 5th July to the administration of the North West
Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board. Thus was lost the link
between the maternity and infectious disease services and their
co-ordination which I am afraid may be irretrievably gone.
Again on the 5th July the clinics, the home helps, the mid wives,
the district nurses and all the specialist provision made by the
Ealing Council together with their buildings were handed over to
the Middlesex County Council administration. The distant central
control so essential under such an arrangement is ill fitted to the
close intimate association of the local Town Hall to health problems.
Unfortunately one of the problems before us is now not how will a
scheme affect the ordinary resident of Ealing but how can the
scheme be handled to enable us to see that Ealing is not going to
gain benefits from it rather than some other parts of Middlesex.
We have now to realise that what may rule is the lowest common
denominator, and this is a part which Ealing has never had to play
heretofore.
I am not in a position to give the history of the building up
of the Ealing services, but I can from wide experience say that
Ealing had services equal to any in the country and that the robbing
of such a borough of its health services may have become inevitable
under the Act but appeared to many of us to be a dis-service to
the cause of Public Health not only in Middlesex, but throughout
the country.