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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,
heaLh centres, clinics, pharmacists' shops and elsewhere, as
may be appropriate.
Administrative Arrangements.
In brief outline the following is the administrative set-up:—
1. Regional Hospital Boards, and their local Hospital
Management Committees, are now responsible for the hospital
and specialist services, including the specialist services of
Local Health Authorities.
2. Local Executive Councils are in administrative control
of the general medical practitioner and dental services, either
from the practitioners' own surgeries or from publicly-equippeed
health centres to be established in due course. In addition,
the provision of spectacles, dentures, drugs and medicines is
the responsibility of Local Executive Councils.
3. Local Health Authorities (County or County Borough
Councils—known as "Major Local Authorities") are now
responsible for local government services such as maternity
and child welfare, vaccination and immunisation, care and
after-care, ambulances, blood transfusion and laboratory
services.
The administration of the new National Health Service is in
the hands of these three independently-constituted authorities,
each having jurisdiction over a specified branch of the service. But
the medical need of the individual citizen does not lend itself to
sub-division into three, and the success of the new service will
depend primarily on the extent to which these three administrative
branches can be intertwined. Close liaison will be necessary, both
at authority and officer level, in the interests of public individual
welfare ; and this can be brought about most effectively by the
inclusion or co-option on each of the three administrative bodies
of as many members and officials as possible from the other two.