View report page

maternity beds by way of providing home helps and midwives for domiciliary maternity
cases. So the home help came to work under the Medical Officer of Health and so became
“ medical.” During the 1939—45 war the Defence Regulations allowed the provision
of home helps for other than maternity and child welfare cases. When this power lapsed
at the end of the war the 1946 National Health Service Act propagated this system.
Section 29 allows the provision of a home help in households where such help is required
because of the presence of any person who is lying-in, an expectant mother, mentally
defective, aged, or a child not over compulsory school age.
Present
1) Sources of information
Some information about the present service is to be found in Ministry of Health
Annual Reports, Annual Reports of the Medical Officers of Health and in special reports
by them to their committees. This information was supplemented by discussion with
Medical Officers of Health, Home Help Organisers, Home Helps, General Practitioners,
as well as the patients themselves.
2) Groupings of authorities
In reading the many published details of services it is possible to recognise three
groups of authorities:—
a) the late starters, or not-so-progressive authorities still in the teething stages of
development,
b) those who have passed through their teething troubles and are making progress
towards the third group,
c) the most progressive authorities who have passed through stages (a) and (b) and
have reached stability. This means they are able to forecast the needs of the
service with a fair degree of accuracy.
3) Categories
Unfortunately the cases are not classified according to disease and the majority of
authorities use the following classification: the Ministry of Health Report for 1961 gives
the following figures:—
a) old age and chronic sick—76% of all cases
b) maternity—11%
c) tuberculosis—1%
d) other—12%
Some local authorities make special mention of the acutely ill and the mentally sick.
Others describe services such as those for the incontinent, problem families and infectious
disease.
a) The elderly
I would like first of all to deal with the elderly. I had hoped to avoid this emphasis
on the elderly, because in some areas the home help service is coming to be looked upon
72