View report page

164
The following table is intended to show the deaths of babies
who at one time or another during their first year attended a
clinic, as compared with deaths among those who never attended.
If a baby only attended once it is included in the clinic returns:-

2,190 babies under one year of age attended the Clinics for the
first time during 1934. Within the same period 3,185 babies were
born and 145 died; 46 of these latter are not included in the
above table, as information concerning them was not obtainable.
Although the clinic attendance figures and the births and deaths
figures do not cover exactly the same periods, the attendances of
new cases at the clinics do not fluctuate so greatly as to cause
serious error. Of the 99 babies tabulated who died, 29 had
attended a Clinic in Croydon and 70 had not attended, i.e., 29%
of the deaths were in clinic babies and 70% in non-clinic babies.
Of the 3,185 babies born, approximately 70% attended or would
attend on calculation based on past attendances. The infantile
mortality, estimated on this basis is only 13.1 per 1,000 births for
the clinic babies, and 75.2 per 1,000 births for non-clinic babies.
The following table is interesting, especially when the figures
for under 1 year are contrasted with those for over 1 year.
Approximately 77% of the former group of babies were found
healthy on their first visit and were presumably brought because
their mothers desired expert opinion and advice quite apart from
treatment; in the latter group, 76% were found healthy on the first
visit, which may be interpreted to mean that when a mother first
attends a clinic with a child over a year old she does so because of
some difficulty in management; 72% of babies under 1