View report page

the basic requirements of children if they are to develop fully; the importance of gaining
the family's co-operation and getting them to play an active and responsible part in
running the household; and the maternity and child welfare services. Attention is also
given to practical domestic subjects such as the use of household materials, making the
best of poor equipment and facilities, and teaching mothers to plan menus and budget.
Practical demonstrations, films and film-strips are used as part of the course, which is
designed to show home helps how they can recognise and deal with a mother's inadequacies
in household management and encourage her to improve her standards of
home care so that eventually the family will be able to maintain reasonable standards in
the home without outside help.
Four courses were held in 1959, but unfortunately the generally high staff turnover among
home helps was reflected in the number of specially trained home helps, notwithstanding
that only those who seem likely to remain in the service are selected for training. Thus
the number of these home helps at the end of the year, 118, was no higher than at the end
of 1958. Trained helps receive an additional fourpence an hour for time spent in working
with problem families.
Assistant home help organisers—Post-entry training for assistant home help organisers
is provided through occasional centrally-run refresher courses. It was originally intended
that a course should be spread over some three weeks, but it has been found preferable to
compress it into four days. Each session takes the form of a discussion group whose leaders
are drawn from divisional medical and nursing staff, social workers, home help organisers,
and divisional and central office administrative officers. Subjects include the history and
development of the service and its counterparts abroad; the place of the service in the
public health department and its administration; financial aspects of the service such as
assessment of charges and collection of debts; office methods—records and statistics; staff
management, including recruitment and discipline; home visiting; the special problems of
various types of patient; child care; and other social services.
Assistant home help organisers have usually had up to two years' experience of the
work before they attend a course and they have therefore a considerable amount of
practical knowledge which they can pool for their mutual benefit. Their grounding in
fieldwork enables them to take a full part in discussion at a well-informed level which is of
greater interest and value than an earlier briefing in more elementary aspects of their work.
One course attended by nine assistant home help organisers was held in 1959.
Conferences of home help organisers
Where a service has to meet such varied demands and where the recruitment and servicing
problems of the more prosperous residential areas may be quite different from those of the
densely populated and perhaps more neighbourly districts, consultation among those
responsible for the service in different parts of the county is valuable. It can stimulate ideas
and suggest improvements and also ensures that the advantages of local control and special
knowledge of local conditions do not lead at the same time to discrepancies and undesirable
local variations in the administration of the service. Home help organisers are therefore
brought together about twice a year to meet for an afternoon at County Hall, and subjects
for discussion range from the suggested revision of forms used in the service to the best
way to deal with specially difficult types of case.
Services provided
The work of the service consists in most cases of help so far as is necessary with housework,
caring for children—taking them to school or nursery perhaps—shopping, cooking,
washing, ironing, mending: all the tasks which in fact are normally undertaken by the
housewife. Demand for home help still sometimes exceeds the supply of assistance available,
although only 13 applications were deferred or refused for this reason in 1959.
68