Doctors' Service
On the whole the National Health Service appears to be making a good beginning, and it is encouraging that a start is to be made on building a large health centre, which will be necessarily experimental, at Stoke Newington. The new service cannot work with full efficiency till such centres exist in all large towns, for they are an integral part of the whole conception ; it is peculiarly unfortunate that shortages in the building industry prevent immediate progress with their con- struction. Meanwhile it is well that the action of a small minority of doctors in refusing for one reason or another to take patients on their list should have been ventilated in the House of Commons on Monday. Miss Alice Bacon quoted a number of such cases, notably those of doctors who refused patients on the ground that they were fully able to pay on the old basis. This, in the case of a service open to the whole .population on equal terms, is quite intolerable. The Minister of Health is no doubt right in saying that all responsible medical opinion condemns it, and he will be widely supported in any steps he may feel able to take to check this particular abuse ; his statement that 99 per cent. of the popula- tion have lower incomes than the average G.P. will under the new scheme is striking. Discrimination against particular members of families on the ground of age or health is open to equal condemnation, and to give a warning that persons will not get the same attention as before unless they remain paying patients is a plain attempt, to sabotage the whole of the Health Service Act. Doctors who have accepted service under the Act are under a moral, and quite possibly a legal, obligation to give the service for which the Act provides. It is, it must be repeated, only a small minority who are proving guilty of what under the new conditions must be regarded as unprofessional conduct. The profession itself should find a way of bringing them into line.
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