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14
HEALTH VISITATION.—
The duties of the Lady Health Visitors are, briefly:—
1. To visit systematically all the births in the poorer streets and
some of the births in the better class districts.
2. To instruct the mothers, and especially young mothers with
first children or twins, in the feeding and proper care of their
babies.
3. To pay revisits and to carefully watch over the child's health
and progress, and to take the necessary steps by advice or by
reference to medical or philanthropic agencies to safeguard the
child's prospects and the mother's nourishment and circumstances.
4. To improve the home conditions of the mothers domestically
by help, advice and suggestion, hygienically by referring defects of
structure or environment to the Public Health Department.
For these purposes, the Borough has been divided into two
districts, mapped out as containing those streets in which infant
deaths have chiefly occurred in recent years.
One district is assigned to each Lady Health Visitor, and in the
special streets so named and defined every household in which a
birth occurs is visited on or about the eleventh day after the birth
if the mother is up, or earlier on request, or if there is reason to
believe that the mother is unattended by doctor, midwife or nurse.
It is important to notice that, in these streets referred to, every
birth is visited, and not merely births in those households where
the parents aie ostensibly poor or dirty.
In other streets only those births are supervised where the
mothers are very young, careless, negligent, ill-treated, alcoholic,
deserted, living in poor and domestically squalid surroundings, or
are known to be the chief or sole wage-earners for their families, or
where the children are first children, wasting, debilitated, ailing,
illegitimate or twins.