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The midwives have taken 1,122 blood specimens for the Guthrie
test. This blood test is carried out on babies delivered at home
or discharged after 48 hours, or on babies whose previous tests
have shown doubtful results.

Home nursing service
This service has seen considerable changes in its contribution to
community care. Whilst initially the requirement was for simple
nursing care, the recent tremendous changes in medicine have
brought about significant changes in the role of the nurse. The
home nurse is now required to carry out more complex forms of
treatment. Necessarily she must be prepared to accept more
responsibility than her hospital colleague since, although she
works under the direction of a general practitioner, medical aid
is not so readily available to her as it is in hospital. The home
nurse therefore is trained and acknowledged to be an expert in
in her own field of nursing and her expertise should be used in full.
To this end we have in the service three grades of staff:—
District Nurse (State Registered Nurse).
District Nurse (State Enrolled Nurse).
Nursing Auxiliary—no formal training (formerly known as bathing
attendants).
The home nursing service is available to all members of the
community, regardless of age, who are under treatment at home
for an illness not requiring admission to hospital, or who have
been discharged from hospital to complete their recovery at home.
For the first time the home nursing service was requested by a
renal dialysis unit to provide nursing care for patients undertaking
their own dialysis at home. This is a highly specialised field of
nursing not usually included in training given to student nurses.
To ensure that a high standard of care could be given to the
patients and because the patient and the nurse do not have such
ready access to medical help, it was arranged that a five-day
course of training in a renal dialysis unit should be made available
for all the nurses involved, and five nurses undertook the
training.
It was encouraging to all that, as a result of the close
co-operation between the hospital and the home nursing service,
one particular patient who had experienced considerable difficulty
was able to be maintained at home and subsequently had a
successful kidney transplant.