[Report 1971] / Medical Officer of Health, Buckinghamshire County Council.

  • Buckinghamshire (England). County Council. n 50052973.
Date:
1971
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1971] / Medical Officer of Health, Buckinghamshire County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cooperation between health service personnel, and numerous examples of such developments are to be found in this as in previous annual reports. One aid to cooperation in the case of primary care teams has been the provision of health centres, which must not be looked upon merely as re-housing opera- tions for general practitioners but as premises specially designed, and large enough, to allow full teams of doctors, nurses, administrative staff and others to supply as comprehensive a health care service as possible for their local communities. In the case of the larger health centres, the possibility also presents of providing certain consultant out-patient facilities, thus bringing those nearer to the grass-roots level and facilitating closer cooperation between hospital consultants and members of primary care teams. In 1967 there were no health centres in Buckinghamshire; now there are three open, six under construc- tion, five due for building to be commenced during the current financial year, and nine in the provisional future programme. In addition, the replacement of the highly unsatisfactory clinic premises at Pebble Lane, Aylesbury, is at last in sight. On the nursing side, the process of attaching staff to general practices instead of working on a geographical basis, has been completed, and constitutes one of the most significant developments of recent years, allowing patients to be cared for by teams rather than by doctors and nurses who, all too often, had little idea of each others’ precise roles and objectives. Similarly a variety of links have been forged with hospitals in order to create more closely integrated systems of care. These are well exempli- fied by joint approaches to the provision of midwifery services; by several liaison schemes for the care of particular types of patients; and by the recently developed psychogeriatric scheme in conjunction with the Royal Buckinghamshire and St. John’s Hospital group. The growing amount and standard of nursing care supplied in the domiciliary and health centre settings has made increasing demands on staff, but the level of recruitment has kept pace with these. A major development, with the object of making the best use of nursing resources in the care of patients, has lain in the establishment of a new (Mayston) structure of nurse management which should increasingly demonstrate its value during the months which lie ahead. Local authority health services have always had a particular responsibility towards children and here, too, a process of reorientation has been taking place. A start has been made towards the in- creasing involvement of family doctors in the running of clinics for children in their practices, and cooperation with the hospital paediatric services has likewise been strengthened by the participation of local authority doctors in assessment and other clinics. Large numbers of children are still seen by local authority medical and nursing staff at child health clinics and, during the past five years, there has been a strong move towards an approach based on developmental paediatrics. The statistics of children protected by various forms of immunisation have greatly improved as a result of the intro- duction of a computer controlled system for calling them forward to their family doctors or to local authority clinics when injections are due. Both in the pre-school and school health services selective systems of working have been introduced so that more attention can be concentrated on children who, as a result of their histories or other factors, are thought to be at greater risk of physical or mental disability than their peers. On the dental side, the level of service has risen despite difficulties in securing the requisite staff; and it should shortly be possible to begin to implement the County Council’s long- standing policy of fluoridation of water supplies. Particular attention has been given, within the school health service, to the development of health education, and a valuable and continuing dialogue between health department and teaching staff has assisted in this process. With the growing emphasis on out-patient, day-patient and domiciliary care, the work of the ambulance service has expanded as, indeed, has been the case ever since the advent of the National Health Service in 1948. A major development of the past five years, both nationally and locally, has been much greater emphasis on the training of ambulance personnel. In addition, in Buckinghamshire, a clear policy governing the equipment and replacement of vehicles has been adopted and is now producing dividends in terms of reliability and efficiency. The scheme for dealing with major disasters