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11
to provide him with a life of usefulness and interest. The
family doctor often with the assistance of the district nurse
can secure that the aged person receives prompt treatment for
minor ailments and discomforts. The home help can carry out those
taskswhich are too heavy for the aged and which if neglected turn
a home into a hovel. Clubs, meals at home and meals in restaurants,
laundry service, library service, provision of wireless providing
interest and obviating loneliness, chiropody clinics, and geriatric
advisory clinics, help the old person to keep mobile and active.
The voluntary visitor supervises and brings interest into the
life of the individual, and the provision of holidays makes a
welcome change not only to the old person but very often to those
who have to look after him.
The institution and the hospital or the home for the aged
are a last resort. Housing can and in fact does do much to help.
There are probably many children who would be more willing to have
their parents living with them if the house or flat were designed
to give some sort of separate accommodation for the father or
mother-in-law. At least one authority has adopted a scheme of
providing actual work suitable for old people.
I think we may yet have to consider the possibility of
accommodating old people by a scheme of fostering them. There
are surely many younger people who would be prepared to accept
a reasonably active old person in their household provided that
the local authority paid what must be a generous remuneration for
the responsibility they undertake, and they must be assured that
in time of illness there will be hospital accommodation available
until the old person has recovered.
In the past we have realised the need of supervision of new
bom babies and pre-school children where they have been deprived
of parents. We sought originally to place them in institutions
only to realise how much better off they were if they could live
their lives with families and with family surroundings. Surely
our position is the same in connection with the aged. Child welfare
has proved its value over and over again, not only In the happiness
and improvement in health that it has brought to children but in
the actual financial economy it has effected. A proper understanding of the needs of the aged and the means to preserve them in
health and happiness rather than to treat them when loneliness,
sickness, poverty and disease has overtaken them, must be equally
important in a community such as ours which year by year sees an
increase in the proportion of old people in the population.
This report would be incomplete if I failed to pay a tribute
to the work of the Hampstead Old Peoples' Welfare Association and
the various voluntary bodies associated with the care of the aged.
In particular, I would refer to the help I have received from
General Practitioners, Home Helps, District Nurses and last but
by no means least the members of the Public Health Department.