[Report 1948] / Medical Officer of Health, Leicester Borough.

  • Leicester (England). Borough Council.
Date:
1948
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1948] / Medical Officer of Health, Leicester Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    33/184 (page 23)
    new idea has to overflow the old. I am of the opinion that, ultimately, it will be desirable to restrict the number of general-practitioner- obstetricians very substantially, so that it will be the custom for the midwives to deal with all normal cases and the doctor only to be called in in a real emergency. This principle requires that the general- practitioner-obstetrician should be a specialist in difficult obstetrics, and I feel, therefore, that he should be the possessor preferably of a specialist qualification, or at least have held resident appointments in an obstetric hospital. For a long time it has been the custom in general medical practice for the general practitioner to undertake the confinements among his patients, not necessarily because he wants to do so—although, of course, this is genuinely the case quite often—but rather because he has to do so to keep an interest in the remainder of the family. I feel that this is wrong, and while I welcome the birth of the genus general-practitioner- obstetrician, I hope it will not be long before their numbers are restricted to those practitioners with real specialist experience. Section 24. Health Visiting This section breaks new ground in that it extends the duty of the health visitor (who largely in the past had been restricted to giving advice to expectant and nursing mothers and young children) to persons suffering from illness and to the prevention of infectious disease in addition to her other responsibilities. This means, of course, that the health visitor can become the social worker of the future. I hope that as time goes on it will be possible to reorientate her work (and incidentally this will mean an increase in the number employed) so that she will not only undertake her former duties but be available to the general medical practitioner as his domiciliary nurse-adviser to persons suffering from illness but with a strong emphasis on the after¬ care and rehabilitation of such persons. Section 25. Home Nursing Under this section of the Act it is the duty of every Local Health Authority to make provision for the attendance of a nurse on persons who require nursing in their own homes. This can be done either by the Local Health Authority employing the nurses themselves or by their making an arrangement with some voluntary organisation to act as the Local Health Authority’s agents. In Leicester we were fortunate in that we had a very efficient District Nursing Association, affiliated 23 c