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Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health—1897. 51
The following is a copy of a Memorandum forwarded me by the Local Government
Board:—
Memorandum as to Annual Reports of Medical Officers of Health.
Every Medical Officer of Health, appointed under Order of the Local Government
Board, is required to make an Annual Report with regard to the Sanitary District which
is under his superintendence. This report is to be for the year ending the 31st
December, or, if the Officer at that date has not been in office for a whole year, then
for so much of the year as has elapsed since his appointment. The report is to be made
to the Sanitary Authority, and the Medical Officer of Health himself should send a copy
of it to the Local Government Board and to the London County Council. It should be
made to the Sanitary Authority as soon as practicable after the expiration of the year
to which it relates, and should be in the hands both of the Sanitary Authority and of
the Local Government Board within, at most, five months from the end of the year.
The Board's copy of the report should be forwarded to them when the original is sent
to the Sanitary Authority, except where the report is likely to be printed by order of
the Authority. In such cases the Board need only be supplied with a printed copy.
Article 18 (Section 15) of the Board's Order of 8th December, 1891, specifies the
information to be contained in the Annual Report, and is printed below.
The report should be chiefly concerned with the conditions affecting health in the
district and with the means of improving these conditions. It should consider these
subjects with reference to the past and future, as well as to the particular year; and
the account of the sanitary state of the district generally should, while marking the
point that has been reached in the sanitary state and administration of the district,
indicate directions for further consideration and aotion. The sanitary history of the
year under review should include a record alike of the proceedings of the Medical
Officer himself and of the proceedings taken under his direction or advice.
The Medical Officer of Health, in reporting his proceedings and advice, may find it
convenient to follow, in the main, the order in which the subject matters of his duty
appear in the several paragraphs of Article 18. Special care should be taken to report
fully and explicitly in reporting on the influences affecting or threatening to affect
injuriously the public health within the district; and the causes, origin, and distribution
of disease within the district may usefully be the subjects of annual record. An
account should also be given, both of the actual circumstances of the district up to the
end of the past year, and of any improvement or deterioration that has occurred during
the year in conditions conducive to health or to disease. For example, a vigilant health
officer has in his Annual Report an opportunity for pointing out any facts as to water
supplies and house construction, conditions of storage, and of removal of refuse
customary in the district; together with any facts as to the adequacy or inadequacy of
means of isolation and of disinfection, and the like. And such a Health Officer, reporting
on the diseases and their causes within the district, will generally have some
instructive details to give, either of conditions newly productive of disease, or of matters
that have been remedied with advantage to the public health.
In reporting upon Section 3, not only should the fact of having made systematic
inspections, but the outcome from those inspections should be duly put on record. The
report should contain a full account of inspections, whether systematic or occasional, of
the judgment which the Medical Officer of Health has formed thereon as to the sanitary
state of his district, and of the advice he has in consequence given to the Sanitary
Authority, and the action taken by the Authority thereon. By " systematic " inspections
are meant inspections independent of such enquiries as, under other article of the Order,
the Medical Officer of Health has to make into particular outbreaks of disease, or into
unwholesome conditions to which his attention may have been specially called by complaints
or otherwise, and such inspections will include the house-to-house inspections
which may be necessary in particular localities.