View report page

82
1. Many patients give false addresses on notification. They
give false addresses when they enter and leave institutions. They
wish to evade the supervision which naturally follows notification.
2. Many of the cases are notified for the first time when they
are bedridden or otherwise late in the course of the disease—too
late for the notification to be of much value from a public health
standpoint. The mischief has then been done.
3. The patients arc continually removing from one address to
another, and are difficult to follow up. The demand for cheap
rooms is often so urgent in the borough that very soon after a
room is empty, it is sought by a prospective tenant and occupied
before it has been disinfected or cleansed.
4. Most of the patients are very poor—some are destitute.
With this poverty go crowding and overcrowding in one- or tworoomed
tenements, drink, insufficient food, and insufficient clothing.
The home conditions are such that it is extremely difficult
to prevent the infection of other members of the family. Cases
have occurred where the patient or his family have been too poor
to afford even the equipment necessary to proceed to a sanatorium,
too poor even to be able to pay the railway fare.
In this connection, it is very desirable that sanatoria for the
poor should provide clean linen and clean underclothing for the
patients rather than that the patients should be asked to provide
them. There have been a few instances in Finsbury where the
patients were asked before admission to provide, amongst other
details, 2 pairs of boots and 2 nightshirts. And these patients
had each never possessed more than one pair of boots at a time,
had never seen or worn a nightshirt, and were unable to buy
them, so that they did not proceed to a sanatorium. The practice
of the Public Health Department has been to refer destitute cases
to the poor law officers with a view to their admission to the
Holborn Infirmary. Insured patients are sent to the London
County Insurance Committee. Uninsured patients are referred
for sanatorium treatment to the London County Council Public
Health Department.