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To the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors of the Borough of
Dagenham.
Mr. Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to present to you the annual report on the
state of health and the working of the health services in the
Borough of Dagenham in 1954. i must here pay tribute to Dr.
Herington and his clinical, sanitary and administrative staffs who
have laid the foundations on which you can build a major structure
despite the lack of those key items, the health centres, from the
National Health Service. Dr. Herington has, as he said, kept
this a happy ship and much has been done silently and well in
the past as in all happy ships.
We need not waste time patting ourselves on the backs about
what is going well, let us glance at what needs to be done.
CARE OF This presents a major problem of the health
THE ELDERLY. and welfare services. Those elderly people
who have lost contact with their relatives and
are in need of care and attention are often brought to our notice
by their doctors or by kindly neighbours. Sometimes they do not
realize their need of treatment or of the welfare services. In this
connection, however, it must be said that people at times have
false impressions of the needs of the aged. Often all that is
needed is a period of temporary recuperative treatment to recover,
to a considerable degree, their physical and mental powers. It is
no act of unadulterated kindness to take the elderly man or woman
out of the community unnecessarily and place him or her for a
prolonged period into the new disciplines amongst strangers, a
situation inseparable from institutional life. However, where it is
unavoidable or where some urgent treatment or care is needed
it is always difficult to obtain accommodation for the elderly. The
responsibility for the solution of this problem is ours and we must
meet it. Measures taken since the end of the year will, let us
hope, improve a dreadful situation.
Tuberculosis. This is the biggest of the endemic plagues
which affect man for which we think we know
some of the answers. Application of methods of control with
determination is the need, speaking of the country as a whole. If
the same determination is shown as was shown in the case of
diphtheria we shall eliminate tuberculosis. Our aims, briefly, are
to discover as many existing cases as possible, as early as possible;
make them non-contagious and keep them so; and to trace and
examine contacts of the cases. This, with an intensive campaign of