Health Services: Needed: Support Troops

In addition to doctors and nurses, medical care requires all sorts of supporting troops—hospital orderlies, X-ray technicians, physiotherapists. As care grows more complex, the need for such ancillary personnel rises too. Compared with one health assistant per doctor in 1900, the ratio today is 13 to 1, reports the University of Florida’s Dr. Darrel J. Mase to the A.M.A.’s Council on Medical Education. By 1975 the needed ratio will probably reach 25 to 1. Health may then employ 6,000,000 people, and constitute the nation’s biggest industry.

How and where will all those people be trained? So far, says Dr. Mase, only 13 U.S. universities offer degrees in health-assistant professions other than nursing. About 50 others now plan to enter the field. But Congress has yet to appropriate more than seed money under the Allied Health Professions Act of 1966, which was supposed to finance classrooms, labs and teachers for thousands of students.

The variety of jobs opening up is as bewildering as the swirl of hospital personnel around the patient. The universities with functioning programs offer courses in everything from medical technology to administration, dental hygiene, medical illustration, cell identification and therapeutic recreation. At higher-degree levels, there are courses in rehabilitation counseling and clinical psychology; some schools offer diplomas in such esoteric fields as inhalation therapy and histologic technology (study of tissues to detect disease).

Patients need have no fear that their care will suffer from the wider employment of health assistants. In fact, not only do technicians release doctors from tedious and time-consuming chores; in many cases, the technicians become so skilled that they do these specialized jobs better than most doctors.