Experiences in the first year of an "open door" x-ray department.

In 1946 the Annual Representative Meeting of the British Medical Association recommended that, wherever possible, hospital departments of pathology and radiology should give direct-access facilities to general practitioners, and this policy has repeatedly been urged at meetings of the Radiologists Group. In spite of this, the "open door" department, as it has come to be known, has been slow to find favour. This is due, in the main, to difficulties in accommodation and staffing, both secretarial and technical, but no doubt also in part to resistance by radiologists and clinicians. In February 1964 it was decided that the diagnostic x-ray department at the Middlesex Hospital should give direct