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REPORT ON THE SCHOOL HEALTH SERVICE
DURING THE YEAR 1961
To the Chairman ami Members of the Welfare and School
Attendance Sub-Committee.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to submit my Annual Report for the
year 1961.
During the year the School Health Service continued to
provide a full range of services, details of which are set out
in the body of the report. No serious problems arose out of
infectious diseases but an outbreak of Sonne dysentery
occurred at an Infants School of which a brief account is
set out on page 45.
In the early days of the School Health Service,over
half a century ago, the main problem was the detection and
treatment of gross physical disease due mainly to poverty,
malnutrition and overcrowding. The infectious diseases took
their toll of thousands of lives every year and, what is more
left behind them a legacy of ill-health in the form to heart,
lung and kidney disease, deafness, blindness and a general
lack of stamina and well-being. The School Health Service
was, in fact, one of the measures designed to counteract the
ravages of an adverse physical environment.
The milieu of the schoolchild has, of course,improved
beyond all recognition but it would be wrong to assume that
environmental factors no longer play a decisive part in his
health and development. What has changed, chiefly, is the
nature of the environmental hazards to which he is nowadays
subjected. In the field of nutrition, for example, problems of
scarcity have been replaced by those of over -abundance and
the heavy, over-weight child is now more of a problem than
the thin, undernourished child.
Dental disease is still very prevalent but for different
reasons and the Welfare and School Attendance SubCommittee
have, for some time, been very concerned at the
high proportion of children found at dental inspections to
require treatment. Apart from the provision of dental services,
two factors are mainly involved; firstly the nutrition of the
expectant mother and, later, of the child (and this includes not
only an adequate mineral diet but a sufficiency of vitamins
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