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13
Statistics of social medicine
It is useful, for comparative purposes, to observe the statistics of
towns or areas of roughly equal size. It is known that many factors may
go to make up a vital statistic—latitude, rainfall, social class, type of
industry carried on, proportion of unemployment, overcrowding and
condition of housing being some of these. One of the most important
vital statistics, because it is generally accepted as the most accurate index
of a community's health insofar as any one statistic can be taken as a
measure of that health, is the infant mortality rate, that is the number
of deaths of children under one year of age per thousand live births in
the year. It so happened that in 1949 the infant mortality rate for
Lewisham was lower than that for any other community in the British
Isles of comparable size or larger, and Lewisham was the only large
community to have a rate below 20. The rate was in fact 19.1. This
very satisfactory and almost spectacular record was not known at the time
of writing last year's annual report. The rate itself was known and
published, but the comparable rates of other communities were not
known.
There are many factors which must have gone to produce this
low rate, some of which are "natural" factors as indicated above, but
in addition some credit must fall on the health services and hygiene
services which have been built up by the borough council over the
years. Some of these, namely the personal health services, were
transferred to the county council a little time previously—too short a
time, however, for that particular rate to be significantly affected, but
the infant mortality rate is not the only interesting rate for the comparison
of different communities. I thus came to the conclusion that it would be
desirable not only for ourselves, but for other communities, to make a
more exact comparison of the vital statistics of those communities.
Certain comparable vital statistics are obtainable through the RegistrarGeneral
though, as already stated, they are often obtainable too late to
comment on in the succeeding year, and therefore a scheme was got out
by which additional statistics were to be kept for the communities
concerned and which could be compared early in the succeeding year.
Communities with a population between 200,000 and 300,000 were
chosen, of which there are 14 in England and Wales, and nearly all the
health departments of these communities have promised to keep
the special statistics for the year 1951. These however obviously cannot
be reported and commented on until 1952, but as indicated in my annual
report for last year (page 7), we have ourselves been keeping certain
statistics in social class order for the past two years and an analysis of
these for 1950 is set out below. They are mainly for record purposes
and for comparison in future years, and it would be unwise to make
any major deductions from them. I hope however next year to deal with
this matter at greater length and to publish a comprehensive table
giving the special statistics for the 14 areas of population between
200,000 and 300,000, which are as follows —
Bradford, Cardiff, Coventry, Croydon, Harrow, Hull, Islington,
Lambeth, Leicester, Lewisham, Newcastle, Plymouth, Portsmouth,
Stoke-on-Trent.