[Report 1967] / Medical Officer of Health, Derbyshire County Council.

  • Derbyshire (England). County Council.
Date:
1967
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1967] / Medical Officer of Health, Derbyshire County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/152 (page 9)
    If we can’t persuade a man to stop smoking, then we must do all we can to see he keeps to a cigar or pipe. We haven’t got time to look for a safer cigarette—and spend twenty years proving it. What British doctors have done to save themselves they must try to get the rest of Britain to do—and more also. The abolition of cigarette smoking could reduce Britain’s death rate by a tenth and working time lost from sickness by much more. No other exercise in preventive medicine could do as much. With this P.H.S. report in our hands, it is time for the talking to stop”. National Health Service (Family Planning) Act 1967. In view of the additional responsibilities placed on County Councils under the Family Planning Act of 1967, I thought you would be interested in the following comment made by Mr. U Thant, the Secretary General of the United Nations:— “One of the most interesting features of the change which we see taking place is the desire to look at the population problem, not simply in its strict economic aspects but rather in the broad perspective of human progress in modern societies, which increasingly recognises the need to provide the citizen with the means of controlling the size of his family”. In the course of my reading, I came across some pertinent remarks on family planning delivered by Professor Lincoln H. Day, of Yale University, at a Symposium in Newhaven, Connecticut, in which I thought you might be interested:— “. .. decisions made about child bearing, today, will greatly determine the kind of society we and our children live in, tomorrow. The full impact of child bearing occurs not at conception; not even at birth; but, rather steadily mounts as the child grows, becomes educated, seeks employment, sets up a separate household, and eventually becomes a parent him- self .. . We must recognise that decisions about child bearing are responsive to what happens over the whole range of human experience; our living standards, our aspirations, our fears; our concepts of normal and abnormal, right and wrong. More- over, decisions about child bearing take place over many years of a person’s lifetime. They are subject to change . ..” Health Centres. Until recently Health Centres provided under Section 21 of the National Health Service Act, 1946, have not been very popular with the medical profession, particularly as they were required to pay an economic rent, which was a very large sum in certain instances (e.g. the Health Centre provided by the London County Council in Woodbury Down). Now the Minister has agreed to its being an allowable expense. Still a number of Family Doctors are worried that if they are required to work in Health Centres it might involve a degree of encroachment into their liberty of action. However, if