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(2) Offer to medical practitioners who would care for them, a stock
of leaflets of instructions to mothers as to ante-natal care and
preparation of the home for the confinement.
(3) Offer simple maternity outfits at cost price to medical practitioners,
or to patients referred by them.
2. Maternity Beds.
1 wish to suggest the desirability of asking the Croydon Mothers'
and Infants' Association to consider the enlargement of St. Mary's
Hostel to accommodate 30 instead of the present 17 beds, the Council to
pay an annual subsidy for a part or for the whole of the additional beds.
The extension should, in particular, make provision for (a) difficult, complicated,
or emergency cases, (b) pre-natal admissions, (c) some separate
rooms into which single women and other special cases could be received,
and (d) a separate block for septic cases.
B.—Infant Mortality Illegitimate Children.
Analysis of the death returns for the two years 1922-23 shows that
during these years there were 31 deaths of illegitimate infants born in, or
belonging directly to, Croydon, giving an illegitimate infant mortality among
these Croydon babies of 108 per 1,000 illegitimate births, as compared with
an infant mortality for the same period of 51 among babies born in wedlock.
[The report then gave particulars as to deaths of illegitimate children,
not born in Croydon, but admitted to a charitable institution in the borough,
which are credited to the town, and raised the infant mortality for the period
in question from 108 to 215 per 1,000 births. The difficult problem involved
was discussed in the report, and various suggestions offered, which were
subsequently referred by the Committee to the management of the institution
for consideration].
C. Infant and Child Mortality—Miscellaneous Factors.
1. Issue of booklets of instruction.—A large part of the ill-health and
acute illness, fatal and otherwise, affecting young children is due to the
ignorance of the parents of the elementary rules of dietetics, household
management, and good health. This is daily combatted by the work done
by Health Visitors in the home, and by the instruction, advice, and example
given at Welfare Centres. It is, however, very desirable that the mother
should, where capable of utilising it, have by her for daily reference some
simple authoritative account of the management of the young child. I wish
to recommend that authority be given for Health Visitors in connection with
their home visits under the Notification of Births Act to present, to mothers
likelv to profit by it, one of the enclosed booklets ("To Wives and Mothers"),
prepared for the purpose by the Central Association for Maternity and Child
Welfare, and sold at special rates to local authorities. The estimated, annual
cost would be in the neighbourhood of £25.
2. Home Nursing.—Measles and whooping cough are responsible for a
considerable proportion of the deaths occurring in infancy and in early childhood.
Beyond this, an appreciable part of the physical disability found in
children on entry into the elementary schools, and there interfering with their
capacitv for education, is due to neglected attacks of these diseases early in
life, while they also play an important part in preparing the way for active
tuberculosis in the older child and the adolescent, which is a source eventually
of great expense to the public as wall as of grave disability to the patient.
Proper nursing of the graver cases of measles and whooping cough—particularly
those giving evidence of lung infection—would, therefore, be a
measure of true ultimate economy as well as being a direct means of increasing
the physical well-being of the population.