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Convalescent Home for children between 2 and 5 years of age.
The Council's four beds at the Byfloot Home for toddlers have
been kept full without any difficulty throughout the year. Now
and again the home has been ih quarantine for infectious disease
which fortunatoly has never meant an empty bed. There is a
demand for an extension of the service to give mothers
convalescence with children but there is little chance of this
while the war continues.

Nursery places are always full and waiting lists are so long
at the older nurseries that many will be too old before the place
they have on the list is reached. Eight nurseries were open at
the end of the year with three more getting ready and the total
places in the eleven nurseries including tho 20% addition will
number 808. The number of children in the district under 5 years
of age on the 31st December was 12,600.
Suggestions have appeared from various sources that
nurseries such as these should be continued after the Year is over
for the purpose of providing a safe and pleasant dumping ground
where an overwrought mother or a mother wanting an afternoon off
to shop or go to the pictures, could leave her child in safety
till she returned for him. Such a scheme is not only
thoughtlessly cruel to the child who is deliberately left with
strangers but he is exposed to all manner of chance infections
before he has acquired much immunity. In the normal routing
a child is exposed to infection from a limited number of people
outside the family, a few aunts and uncles and friends, but in
a nursery the child is exposed to infection from say thirty to
forty children and adults each of whom will have a few aunts and
uncles and friends any or all of whom they may see when they go
homo at night and whose infections are there to be taicen to the
nursery next day.
The extent of sickness is sufficient for the Ministry to
permit a 20% addition to the net number of places available at
each nursery because it is found that for various reasons, most
of them sickness the average child is away for l/5th of the year.
A healthy child of 15 months will catch cold after cold at a
nursery ending with bronchitis or broncho-pneumonia and perhaps
an acute mastoid as well. This sequence is tc frequent to
pass unnoticed, the alleged cause being the early morning
journey to the nursery.
There would be a real danger to health if nursery places
were made available for large numbers of mothers each to park
their young children say for one half day a week while they had
the time off. It is to be hoped that this kind of nursery will
nover become popular as it may be a hot bed for catarrhal
infections particularly, although gastro intestinal maladies as
well as the notifiable infectious would doubtless not be wanting