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natal sessions at General Practitioner Obstetrician's surgeries,
thus enabling doctor and midwife to work as a team in the patients'
interest.
I am only too happy to encourage this co-operation and am gladd
to see an increasing number of requests for the services of a midwife
for this purpose.
Supervision of Midiwives
Miss E. O'Connor, Superintendent of the Lady Rayleigh Training
Home, has continued to undertake the non- medical supervision of
midwives.
Health Visiting
In 1963 the health visiting staff was reduced by one and a replacement
has not yet been found, in spite of repeated advertising in the
nursing journals in which there are about one hundred health visitors
posts advertised weekly. Only 600 health visitors are lined each
year throughout the country, which falls far short of the demand.
It is significant that only one of our staff of twelve (which
includes the Superintendent Health Visitor, nine health visitors and
two tuberculosis visitors) is under 30 years of age an that during
the next few years four of your Health Visiting staff will reach the
age of retirement.
It has become necessary to reorganise the work of health
visitors so that they can give as much of their time as possible to
home visiting. Health visitors now work from their clinics instead
of the Town Hall, this has saved a considerable amount of traveling
time. It is hoped that when some of the staff pass the driving test
and receive car allowances, they will decrease still further the time
spent in travelling around their districts. (Inclement weather is also
a great time waster and this could be largely obviated by health
visitors using cars.
'Selective' home visits have become the rule rather than the
exception, that is to say more visits are paid to families with Problem
than to families who are assumed do not have them or who can
such difficulties. If there were more staff perhaps, this method could
be used in a more reasonable manner and with a better standard of
selection.
In Essex a workable population case-load for a health visitors is
assessed to be 4,000. In Barking the population case-load is 8,000
per health visitor. Although a health visitor does not hold records
for every member of the population on her area, a nigh proportion of
households are visited during the year. In an assessment made of
the number of visits recorded during one month of the year, it was
28