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Discusses the efficiency of disaster management policies and programmes in Australia. Argues that there are long‐standing deficiencies in strategic and operational planning and forecasting approaches. Urges more co‐operation and co‐ordination between the various emergency services. Discusses the development of terrestrial and space technologies which could be used in disaster management.

THE responsibility for materials handling methods, as for all other production methods, should be made the clear responsibility of the head of Work Study. The reasoning behind that firm conclusion is very logical. Industry in general depends for its success upon the application of some process such as machining or finishing of raw materials. Every such operation adds to its value and builds up a firm's turnover. It is therefore obvious that the more time there is devoted to conversion the less will be wasted on profitless storage or unproductive transport from one part of the works to another.

The terms are not synonymous; their differences are mainly of function and areas of administration. Community Health is used in national health service law; environmental health to describe the residuum of health functions remaining with local authorities after the first NHS/Local Government reorganization of 1974. Previously, they were all embraced in the term public health, known for a century or more, with little attention to divisions and in the field of administration, all local authority between county and district councils. In the dichotomy created by the reorganization, the personal health services, including the ambulance service, may have dove‐tailed into the national health service, but for the remaining functions, there was a situation of unreality, which has persisted. It is difficult to know where community health and environmental health begin and end. From the outside, the unreality may be more apparent than real. The Royal Commission on the NHS in their Report of last year state that leaving environmental health services with local authorities “does not seem to have caused any problems”—and this, despite the disparity in status of the area health authority and the bottom tier, local councils.

SOCIAL scientists have not yet been able to formulate any general laws about behaviour in industry that are capable of broad application. In recent years, however, they have made many useful case studies of which the one just published by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research is typical. It is an approach to the problem which can do much to increase the understanding of the way in which people react to common industrial situations.

AT the present time leisure is a subject which does not attract much serious attention. Sporadic discussions break out now and again among small groups; or it provides a topic for the popular press during the ‘silly season’. There is, however, a distinct possibility that in the measurable future an Institute of Leisure Study will be needed.

THERE have been official links for the past twelve years between the Institute of Incorporated Work Study Technologists and Time and Motion Study. Many of its members have been valued contributors to our pages and the Institute has had editorial space for its news.

THE centripetal forces at work in the world seem to draw all human associations into larger groups. Work Study has been no exception to this, as the formation of a European Federation six months ago indicates. Another manifestation of the same tendency is the letter we print from a correspondent suggesting that there is only room for one professional organisation for Work Study in this country.

WHEN this country began its transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, the journeyman used to own his personal tools. The carpenter brought his hammer and saw when he started a new job. Today the plumber with his bag of tools is probably the closest approximation to the worker of those early days, in which there subsisted between the two sides a sense of partnership which is too rarely found in this age.

WE have recently published one or two articles in which a contributor with a considerable knowledge of the Chinese economy has described some of that country's industrial activities. The articles have been scrupulously factual and impartial in revealing the ingenuity which has enabled a people desperately short of the technological resources of the industrialised nations to secure for themselves some of life's essentials.

THROUGHOUT the world today, there are millions of people living in misery and disease, and on the verge of starvation. The dominating feature of the next decade will be the assertion of all peoples in the newly‐developing countries of their claim to a greater share of the world's goods. There will be a revolution in people's expectations: they will wish to achieve the break‐through from their present stage of poverty during the span of this present generation. Most prominent statesmen in the richer countries recognise that this is the central problem facing mankind. The need now is for their wider public also to understand this and for the governments of these countries to take collective and timely action. Modern management in the broadest sense should take account of these new and very striking forces.