[Report 1969] / Medical Officer of Health, Ipswich County Borough.

  • Ipswich (England). County Borough Council.
Date:
1969
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1969] / Medical Officer of Health, Ipswich County Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    hospital setting, the need for general practitioner obstetrics to be possible in that setting seems generally accepted. This will improve even further the already close co-operation between the family doctor, the hospital and the domiciliary midwife, and the mother will get the best of both worlds by being delivered if necessary in the hospital environment with the support of the doctor and midwife in whom she has placed her trust. Ipswich must not fall into the trap of providing a sausage machine de- livery service by a technically safe but rather impersonal obste- tric service. For several years each perinatal death has been carefully examined in detail by the obstetric team to see what lessons can be learned for the future. This is a worthwhile though time consuming exercise for all of us and I am grateful to all my medical and midwifery colleagues for their co-operation in this work. Particularly I would like to thank Mr. F. R. Stansfield for his regular attendance at the perinatal mortality meetings until his retirement. His wealth of knowledge and experience has been of great value to us all and it should be very satisfying for him to know that some of his wisdom has been passed on either at our meetings or in the case summaries which go to all the family doctors in the town. The satisfactory state of our obstetric service is a result of personal effort on many sides within the profession. Sometimes however, the medical services need outside help. Such is the case with the family doctor service in the town. We have lost two family doctors recently, one moving from the town and one untimely death. The ability of a town to attract new doctors in largely dependant on two things. Firstly, the medical and edu- cational services available to them, and secondly the physical facilities. With the construction, slowly, of a new district general hospital, good links w/ith hospital staff, and good post-graduate educational facilities, the town can count itself lucky. The town must now play its part if we are to maintain a really excellent service from our family doctors. Interest has increased in the provision of Health Centres in recent years and planning is pro- gressing slowly w'ith the first. Others are however needed tosolve intolerable problems of accommodation for some doctors. Deve- lopment of new buildings and decay of old practice buildings are threatening the doctors security and at the same time the patient is expecting a steadily higher standard of practice accommodation. There is no time for a breathing space to see what eventually happens to the latest Green Paper and the Local Authority cannot