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17
VITAL STATISTICS.
The calculation of the vital statistics of a district
is a kind of periodical stocktaking of its condition of
health. Unfortunately, to pursue the analogy, the
Medical Officer of Health is not furnished with full
enough figures or an adequate set of books to be sure
of reaching exactly the right balance. He gets
approximately all the available information concerning
the more serious infectious diseases except Influenza,
Measles and Whooping Cough, which are not. notifiable
except the first when it is complicated with Pneumonia.
His information with regard to all other illnesses is
very scrappy and incapable of presentation in statistical
form. It is not that information does not exist. The
School Medical Service, the Poor Law Medical Service
and the National Insurance Medical Panel, each no
doubt has excellent records of its activities among the
residents in the Borough : and the same is probably
true of the local hospitals and general medical practitioners.
The difficulty is that these health services
are not correlated with the local public health service,
and their "books" are not therefore available for the
local health "audit."
The weekly returns from the registrars of births
and deaths are a valuable and our chief source of
knowledge. Death certification has not yet, however,
reached a thoroughly satisfactory standard of scientific
reliability, and the local Medical Officer of Health would
frequently be glad of additional and clearer particulars
concerning causes of death to enable him to come to
well-founded conclusions. Birth notification and registration
also would yield more accurate statistics if they
were co-ordinated, and if births were transferable by a
similar procedure to that which now applies to deaths.
A courtesy transfer takes place between some medical
officers of health, and the Registrar-General gives an
annual summary, but an official weekly or quarterly
return of transferred births would be more satisfactory.
A good many valuable facts concerning maternal and