ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by recalling the objectives of reorganisation and considering the tasks prescribed for community medicine in relation to these objectives. By focusing on the challenges and dilemmas confronting District Community Physicians, it may well be possible to provide a microcosm of the issues involved more generally in making reorganisation work. The Hunter Report further emphasised the fundamental importance to the specialists in Community Medicine in their broadened role at every level, of grasping the opportunities offered by reorganisation, suggesting that to a considerable extent success or failure depended on their contribution. In relation to environmental health work, those Community Physicians with ‘proper officer’ responsibilities can be spending varying proportions of their time on these duties but with the immediate and unscheduled demands of, for example, infectious disease control, likely at the very least to prove disruptive of other activities.
