Valleys Medical Facilities

With all the high incidence of ill-health and accidents there was a great need for medical treatment. Such treatment cost money, however, and it was often precisely those who were ill or injured who could least afford to pay. In such circumstances it is not surprising that wherever possible people tried to treat themselves and that the type of 'folk was so rife.

When people were so ill that they had to receive hospital treatment they might if they were lucky belong to a Friendly Society which would pay for it, otherwise they would be forced into the dreaded fever hospitals of the Workhouses. Local Authorities were very slow to build hospitals-the first hospital in the Rhondda was not built until 1887 and then it only had 4 beds to serve a population of nearly 100,000 people!

Even by 1914 when the population of Rhondda was 180,000 there were only 88 hospital beds in the valley. Matters had improved by this time as far as receiving medical treatment from a doctor was concerned. This was mainly because most Colliery Companies had employed doctors to treat their workers and their families. These medical schemes were paid for by deductions from the miners' wages and in time they were to be taken over and run by the miners themselves, for particularly where workers might be seeking compensation for an accident in the pit, there was a feeling that the doctor might not go against his employer, the Colliery Company.

These Miners Medical Schemes led to South Wales having the most developed medical facilities for ordinary people in the whole of the United Kingdom by 1914. The quality of these medical schemes was praised and envied all over Britain. The Tredegar Medical Scheme became one of the models for the National Health Service created by a son of Tredegar, Aneurin Bevan, when he was Minister of Health in the Labour Government of 1945-1950.

Despite such advances however, the death-rate and the infant mortality rate still remained much higher in South Wales than in many parts of the country. Prevention was obviously more important than cure!