[Report 1952] / Medical Officer of Health, Glasgow.

  • Glasgow (Scotland)
Date:
1952
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1952] / Medical Officer of Health, Glasgow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    16/338 (page 14)
    At present in the General Scheme, which employs the services of what is equivalent to 520 full-time helps, over 350 are allocated as permanent helps. The fact that in the last three months 40 persons have been added to the permanent scheme illustrates the growing claims of the permanently incapacitated. The difficulty of admission to hospital has considerable bearing on this problem. Prior to the National Health Service Act there was a dual arrangement for hospital admission in Glasgow. The voluntary hospitals conducted their own admission departments and were approached directly by the practitioner. On the other hand, admissions to the eighteen municipal hospitals were arranged through a Central Admission Bureau, the Admission Bar as it was called. This arrangement was satisfactory, the only drawback being that the voluntary hospitals tended to dismiss home their incurable cases and advise the patients’ doctor to make application to the Admission Bureau for their admission to a municipal hospital. As the Health Department was obliged to provide hospital facilities for poor people and pei sons in receipt of public assistance this procedure resulted in the voluntary hospitals retaining patients in the younger age groups while the municipal hospitals received a disproportionate number of aged chronic and incurable cases. With the removal of the all-over responsibility of the Medical Officer of Health conditions to-day with regard to admission are much less satisfactory. The ex-voluntary7 hospitals still largely select their patients while the ex-municipal hospitals pay less and less attention to the Admission Bureau and admit an ever increasing proportion of patients either directly from the dispensary lists or at the request of consultants. They have in addition entered into competition with one another to upgrade themselves in an endeavour to attract nursing staff and provide facilities and treatment on a par with the best of the ex-voluntary hospitals, partly by a reduction in the number of beds. This voluntary depletion of much needed accommodation is out of keeping with the spirit of the Welfare State. The chronically sick and elderly who require hospital treatment now receive insufficient attention, with the result that there is a constant waiting list of many hundreds. The time is overdue for the Regional Hospital Board drastically to review its present system of admission. Powers of Local Health Authorities regarding Research (Section 29). This section empowered the Local Health Authority to conduct research, and a very useful guide was given in the Department of Health’s publication “ What Local Authorities can do to promote