The Organisation of Panel Practice

COMPLAINT has been made by Insurance Committees that they are so largely engaged in carrying out arrangements which have been imposed upon them by the Minister that they are unable to develop the Insurance Medical Service on their own initiative. This is, to a large extent, unavoidable. In a national system the nature of the service required and the machinery for securing it must inevitably be determined centrally and prescribed in some considerable detail in regulations issued by the central department. But the medical service for the insured would be a dismal failure if it were to depend solely upon the written word emanating from Whitehall, or even upon Whitehall control carried out by Government inspectors. This medical service is, and must always remain, a very human service, and the measure of its success will depend upon the extent to which the patient has confidence in his doctor and the extent to which the doctor in turn feels assured that he may look to those engaged in the local administration not only for justice and fair play, but for a sympathetic, human interest in his