NOTIFICATION AND ITS USES

At the top of Newsholme's agenda when he joined the Local Government Board was the launching of a national tuberculosis program. His experience in Brighton led him to envision a comprehensive strategy operating on national guidelines but organized and administered by local health authorities. Notification of cases to the Medical Officer of Health would be the starting point. He never thought of notification as a mere statistical or administrative exercise. It must be the beginning of constructive action by local authorities. While M.O.H. in Brighton, he held that towns should not initiate notification of tuberculosis until they were prepared to offer the patient whose case was notified “all possible help” in return. Once in Whitehall and after notification was compulsory, he continued to insist that the justification for notification was what followed.

We have seen in Chapter 6 that there had been some professional opposition to notification of tuberculosis and a widely held apprehension that compulsory notification would be followed by social and economic discrimination against the disease's victims.