Annual report of the Medical Department / Federation of Malaya.

  • Malaya. Medical Department.
Date:
[1953]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Medical Department / Federation of Malaya. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    9/116 (page 5)
    vacation during 1954 of the Tanglin Hospital in Kuala Lumpur by the various offices which at present occupy it, there is a hope that the buildings may revert to the Medical Department for a training school for health staff. Laboratory services are now beginning to show deficiencies— the Institute for Medical Research, with much important research on the go, is reluctant to devote its time to routine work. Partly due to the attention drawn to this deficiency by the report of the Medical Education Enquiry Committee headed by Sir David Lindsay Keir, the question is now under discussion as to whether laboratory and research services will be combined and expanded or whether they will develop separately. The tendency at present appears to be to consider development of clinical laboratories in the large hospitals under clinical pathologists, and public health laboratories in the various regions to deal with the public health and practitioner service requirements. Research would remain concentrated at the Institute in Kuala Lumpur, but as required temporary local laboratories would be set up. One matter causing great concern is the inadequacy of the facilities for the treatment of mental disease. The huge mental hospital at Tanjong Rambutan is very much under-staffed and has more than reached its limit of capacity. To make way for the urgent cases the less urgent are discharged only to require re-admission after a short period of time. Nothing is done in the outpatient departments of the hospitals to hold psychiatric clinics which might relieve the strain in the mental hospitals. Recent reports have shown that large hospitals such as that at Tanjong Rambutan are too big to permit effective administration, and as this state of affairs is likely to get worse, consideration may at an early date have to be given to decentralizing mental hospitals and keeping them to such a size that the psychiatrist will have time to run psychiatric clinics in the hope of reducing in-patients. Here again however staffing difficulties may prove insuperable. The stores problem is coming no nearer to solution with the threat to deprive the Stores Organisation of the Light Street Godown in Penang, and the Batu Bulk Store at Batu Village. An adverse report on the vulnerability of our whole stores organisation to fire, makes it even more important that steps should be taken as soon as possible to improve the stores position. The work has been much increased by additional requirements of the relief teams, the police and the Federation Military Forces. While ideally the stores departments should be situated at a Port such as Port Swettenham with direct rail link, such a store would be perhaps too vulnerable in time of war. The stores department however has plans under consideration for centralization of storage and manufacture, and has also been considering the advantages and disadvantages of Federal stores in States. The Institute for Medical Research has entered a phase of renewed activity stimulated by the approach to completion of its new laboratories. The increasing value of virus research, and in particular research into the spread of yellow fever and Japanese encephalitis have stimulated the formation of a new division and an increased interest in mammal and insect vectors of disease.