HEALTH CENTRES AND COMMUNITY HEALTH NEEDS

It might seem desirable to give you a definition of health centres at the beginning of this paper, especially for the few to whom this is still a novel idea. But I think I would rather allow the concept to emerge from description and discussion later, a synthetic rather than an analytical approach. I hope with quite broad strokes to bring to your view the health centres I believe appropriate to the community at the present stage of our development of health services—perhaps I should say at this critical period. I shall direct your attention to principles only—there are many details of function, finance and design which cannot be discussed in a short paper.