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65
Your Council has a fleet of three civil ambulances under
the control of the Highways Committee, and one fever
ambulance under the control of the Public Health Committee.
Although the same general medical practitioner may be visiting
or attending accident, maternity and fever cases on the same
round, it has generally been the custom for the vehicles and
staff of civil and fever ambulance services to be quite separate
organisations. Whereas it is conceivable that some risk might
be incurred if, for instance, an expectant mother were transferred
to a maternity hospital in an ambulance and by an
attendant just returned from the conveyance of a scarlet fever
or erysipelas patient without elementary precautions being
taken, in my opinion the risk is so exceedingly remote as to
justify the Council in giving consideration to the advisability
or otherwise of providing two separate services administered
and staffed by two differently constituted Committees. As
the garages may soon have to be demolished to make room for
the Ive Farm Depot of the Highways Committee, I suggest
that the present would be an appropriate time to consider
also the question of a combined service for the upkeep and
maintenance of all motor transport under the control of the
two Committees concerned.
It is sometimes difficult to break with custom and tradition,
and even more difficult to admit that public money may have
been spent needlessly; but an honest endeavour to effect
changes to meet changing circumstances is always more
justifiable than expensive persistence on a set course merely
because it happens to have been set by our predecessors acting
on the knowledge then at their disposal.
After consideration of above report, the Local Sanitary
Authority decided—
(a) That the routine spraying with liquid disinfectant of
premises in which cases of the commoner notifiable infectious
diseases have occurred, be discontinued; and
that it be left to the discretion of the Medical Officer of
Health to take such steps as he may consider necessary in
individual cases.
(b) That the infectious disease ambulance be incorporated in
the Council's civil ambulance service, and that all proper
precautions be taken in connection with special cases.