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ambulance services, and finally to take cremation bookings. Information concerning such things as
the times and location of the various health and welfare clinics, including venereal diseases clinics
(which are dealt with on a separate line), can be supplied at any time to callers.
The service benefits increasingly from the special knowledge and experience which the Duty
Officers continue to gain in the course of their work, and by the other officers concerned taking
fuller advantage of the system and placing greater reliance on it as they become accustomed to its
possibilities. Hospitals, police, ambulance service, G.P.O. telephone operators, emergency medical
relief services, medical practitioners. Church social workers, and a widening range of official and
unofficial organisations are making reciprocal use of the facilities to mutual advantage.
During the period 1st January to 31st December, 1966, a total of 7,504 calls were dealt with,
4,948 relating to the City of Westminster, and 2,556 to the Royal Borough of Kensington and
Chelsea. An analysis is given in Table 8 page 67, from which it will be seen that the most numerous
problems concerned mental health and child welfare. Miscellaneous calls again covered a wide
spectrum of matters, examples of the more common being: requests for a doctor to attend a patient
whose normal medical practitioner was unobtainable or for a patient who was unregistered, emergency
hospital admissions, and emergencies relating to other Boroughs, whilst notifications by the
police of dangerous structures, and of larceny or damage to Council properties, river flood warnings,
and notice of other environmental health hazards were also made through the system. The two most
unusual calls made this year were probably one from a person who wished to know if he would be
allowed to transport his bicycle across central London on the roof of a taxi without contravening
traffic regulations, and the other from someone who was referred by an outside telephone operator
under the impression we could advise on the exact location of a certain Public House.