[Report 1972] / Medical Officer of Health, West Sussex County Council.

  • West Sussex (England). County Council.
Date:
1972
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1972] / Medical Officer of Health, West Sussex County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    97/114 (page 95)
    THE HUNTER REPORT A MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH’S VIEW* T. McL. GALLOWAY, m.d., f.r.c.p., d.p.h., dr.p.h. County Medical Officer of Health West Sussex County Council, Chichester The Report of the Working Party on Medical Administrators will be recognised as a milestone in the evolution of medical care in this country. It is the most recent and possibly the most significant of a series of remarkable publications which taken together do their progenitors great credit and translate ideals into something almost within reaching distance. The first Report of the Joint Working Party on the Organisation of Medical Work in Hospitals, the Report of the Twentieth Anniversary Conference on the National Health Service and the Scottish Report on Doctors in an Integrated Health Service rank with the Hunter Report and the Report of the Royal Commission on Medical Education as essen¬ tial and exciting elements in the change from a guerilla activity to a combined operation. The medical officer of health is no stranger to the problems - or most of them - cata¬ logued in the Hunter Report and considerable progress has been made already, in im¬ proving attitudes towards working together, in reducing factional suspicions and in pre¬ paring to make the most of organisational change. The Community Physician The particular concerns of the future specialist in community medicine summarised in Hunter’s paragraph 136 are, without any amendment, the current preoccupations of any self-respecting M.O.H. and this includes the very considerable involvement which a grow¬ ing number of M.O.H.s have had in the hospital activity-not just recently but for years. Although the working party ‘were under the disadvantage of not knowing what would be the management structure of the new regional and area authorities or whether there would be any management organisation at a district level’, the Report is more welcome as it is, uncomplicated by detailed definitions of roles and relationships. These are in any case matters of chance and adaptation as well as of design and it is to be hoped that the books of revelations yet to appear will not be too detailed and inflexible in what they prescribe. Specialists in community medicine will be ‘a clearly identifiable group distinct from the other doctors and from other health service administrators’ and it was with this in mind that the Society of Medical Officers of Health, the Association of Senior Administrative Medical Officers (of Regional Hospital Boards), the Society of Scottish Medical Admini¬ strators and other related interests promoted the Faculty of Community Medicine of the Royal Colleges of Physicians. The Faculty is actively working with the university depart¬ ments to develop schemes of training which will be vital to the success of our speciality as well as that of the National Health Service and it is accepted, as the Hunter Report suggests, that there should be more contact and exchange between the academic and service staffs. Until the breed of new community physicians emerges in five to ten years’ time the community physicians of that interim period will be heavily dependent on the teaching departments for help, not least in the elaboration of operational research projects, so that there will be a recognisably worthwhile product from the resources committed to these projects. Gordon McLachlan commented some years ago that we needed better rather than more research and called for some discipline in this increasingly important - and expensive - activity. A. L. Cochrane in his recent Rock Carling lecture reinforced this view. Carefully designed testing of existing and modified systems of medical care delivery will, I hope, be done at all levels of the service, but this will require coordination - dupli¬ cation of effort must somehow be minimized. The people with the necessary skills are too *A summary of a paper read at a Conference on the Report of the Working Party on Medical Administrators held in the Central Hall, London S.W.l. on 27th July, 1972. Reprinted (with permission) from the Royal Society of Health Journal (1973) 93,44-45.