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2. Health Centres and general practitioner services—
i.e., general personal health care by doctors and dentists
whom the patient chooses. These personal practitioner
services are to be available both from new publicly
equipped Health Centres and also from the practitioners'
own surgeries.
3. Various supplementary services—including midwifery,
maternity and child welfare, health visiting, home
nursing, a priority dental service for children and expectant
and nursing mothers, domestic help where needed on
health grounds, vaccination and immunisation against
infectious diseases, additional special care and after-care
in cases of illness, ambulance services, blood transfusion
and laboratory services. (Special school health services
are already provided for in the Education Act of 1944.)
4. The provision of spectacles, dentures and other
appliances, together with drugs and medicines—at hospitals,
Health Centres, clinics, pharmacists' shops and
elsewhere, as may be appropriate.
General Practimoner Services—Health Centres.
A main feature of the personal practitioner services is to
be the development of Health Centres. The object is that the
Health Centre system, based on premises technically equipped
and staffed at public cost, shall afford facilities both for the
general medical and dental services and also for many of the
special clinic services of the local health authorities, and sometimes
also for out-post clinics of the hospital and specialist
services. Besides forming a base for these services, the Centres
will also be pble to serve as bases for various activities in
health education.
The Bill makes it the. duty of the county and county
borough councils to provide, equip, staff and maintain the
new Health Centres to the satisfaction of the Minister. The
local authorities will directly administer such of their own local
clinic facilities as they may provide in the Centres. Doctors
and dentists, however, who use the new Centres while participating
in the general personal practitioner service will
be in contract only with the new Executive Councils, and it
will be for those Councils to arrange with the local authorities
for the use of the Centres' facilities by those doctors and
dentists.