View report page

21
The duties of the female staff as 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 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.
5. To attend and supervise their respective Centres for Infant
Welfare. .
6. Deal with those notifiable infectious diseases peculiar to early
infancy.
7. To make enquiries as to the cause of failures to notify births
under the Notification of Births Act, 1907.
8. To inspect the homes of verminous children notified by the
London County Council as required by that body.
9. To make inquiry respecting persons notified under the Tuberculosis
Order, 1913, and visit dispensary cases.
For the above purposes the Borough has been divided into three
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 a 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 are 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.
During the year 2,964 homes have been visited where children have
been born.