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VI. DENTAL TREATMENT.
The attached tables summarise the work which has been done
at the two dental centres during the year.
One or two interesting cases of orthodontic work in schoolchildren
have occurred in which it has been possible with the aid of
the new apparatus to save teeth which formerly would have been
extracted.
The pressure of work at the Bermondsey centre has increased
so much that at the end of the year the following report was
submitted to the Committee:—
"For the past six years there has been an increasing pressure
of work on the staff of the dental centres. This is due to an
appreciation of and to an increase in the demand for those
services. This demand has been greatly increased by the opening
of the new Public Health Centre. In Bermondsey, much
more so than at the Rotherhithe centre, there is a continual demand
for the immediate relief of pain by patients who come
without appointment, particularly at the evening sessions, and
these patients, of necessity, require attention. The evening
sessions can be fully occupied with the routine appointment
work, but allowance of time has to be made for non-appointment
patients, and this causes unduly large spaces between appointments.
Even when allowance is made for the casual patients
it is a very common experience to find these patients attending
in such numbers as to cause dislocation of the evening's work.
"A considerable period of waiting is thus caused and in the
past we have used every endeavour to avoid this delay. It is
found that there is insufficient time at the operator's disposal
for him to do his work in a proper manner for each individual
patient, and such fatigue on the part of the Dental Surgeon is
caused as constitutes a definite danger to the patients.
"When the Bermondsey Centre was at 110 Grange Road, it
was open to patients for fifteen sessions a week, including five
evening sessions of which Dr. Grantley Smith did two and Mr.
Shapland three. Mr. Shapland also did two evening sessions