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appointing the better qualified nurses to posts usually
occupied by junior medical officers. The fact that the
severely wounded largely fail to come down to the rear
means, however, that most of the hospitals in the rear are
filled with light or moderate cases. Nevertheless, inadequate
and unsound treatment gives rise to chronic sepsis,
especially ostemyelitis, contractures and unnecessary
deformation and to undue prolongation in the period of
recovery.
Poverty and furnishings, equipment and supplies and
meagreness of operating funds on the one hand, and the
incompetency of the hospital rank and file recruited mostly
from uneducated levels of the people on the other hand, often
combine to make of the hospitals wretched shelters, as
unsanitary, unclean and comfortless as the houses to which
the majority of the staff are accustomed.
These defects are realized by the Army Medical
Administration, but no great change can be effected until a
sufficient number of trained personnel are available to
carry out the desired reformation. The Army Medical Administra-
tion runs an Army Medical College for the technical education
of medical officers, but the College does not undertake the
training of under officers and men. However, a beginning of medical training of all ranks, in certain field centres, has now been instituted, and advantage is being taken of the Weishengshu Emergency Medical Service Training School for
the same purpose. The only drawback the limited facilities
of the Training School.
While such training will improve the quality of the personnel especially that of the lower ranks, and can provide on expansion new cadres in adequate numbers, it will not
remedy the shortage of officers (doctors) who cannot be
educated in less than five or six years. To secure additional
qualified