View report page

31
admission to a residential Home. There is often quite a considerable
going and coming as between the half-way house and the hospital on
the one hand and the half-way house and the Home on the other. The
hospital geriatric unit also includes such adjuncts as physiotherapy,
massage and various other kinds of special treatment so as to shorten
the patient's stay in the hospital and to rehabilitate him more firmly.
When we set up our laundry scheme to help incontinent aged
persons we hoped that this scheme might be paralleled by the formation
of a geriatric unit in this area, so that, for example, some old people
who had recently become incontinent could be admitted to the unit,
rehabilitated (and thereby relieved of their incontinence) and then
returned home. If rehabilitation efforts are not made the tendency is
for these incontinent cases to carry on indefinitely and to deteriorate.
Of course it is true that even in the cases which are rehabilitated in
hospital deterioration is likely to continue — though probably more
slowly — or after being checked to recur, but by and large it has been
thought that the geriatric unit can serve a very useful purpose in easing
the life of many old people.
Nevertheless there appears over the years to have been virtually no
progress made for such a unit in this borough, the hospital management
committee and the regional hospital board, one or other of them or both
together, finding reasons why a geriatric unit could not be set up,
although it must be said that the Board appear to be more in favour
of it than the Management committee. In the middle of 1956 it was
stated in Parliament that in all the areas of England and Wales only
seven did not have posts of geriatric physician. As there appeared to be
a considerable discrepancy in the number of cases which should in the
view of the local doctor be in hospital and the number of such cases on
the waiting list of the local hospital, I sent a questionnaire to representative
doctors in the borough to find out the position. In summary
the result was that in practices which covered only a part of the
borough, there were no less than 77 sick old patients for whom inpatient
hospital facilities were desirable in the summer of 1956, and there
had been at one time a maximum of 200 such patients during the
previous year. I reported the facts in detail to the Public Health
committee who authorised me to send copies of the report to both the
hospital management committee and the regional hospital board, and at
the end of the year discussions were still continuing with these
authorities.
Atmospheric pollution
The Clean Air Act
The Clean Air Act 1956 received the Royal Assent in July, but it
was not until the very end of the year that central administrative action
appeared in the form of various memoranda. Some brief notes on the
application of the Act follow: