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Notifications of whooping cough were 23.
The pattern of health problems developing today
driven home the importance of Health Education as a vital
part of local authority Health Services. Two important
factors in health education are:
(a) Impact on young people - and this must involve
co-operation between parents, teachers and
medical staff
and
(b) Timing.
(a) There have recently been produced
some excellent films on smoking and on sex education, and
several of our Head Teachers have expressed a wish that we
should show these films to the schools.
As a preliminary to this, meetings
have been arranged with parents and staff. This affords
the parents particularly, an opportunity of seeing the
films and of discussing the appropriateness of their use
in the schools concerned.
Obviously if the parents have full
knowledge of the instruction being given in school they will
be in a much stronger position to add their influence to that
of the teachers and the medical staff, and I hope that a
greater measure of success may be achieved.
(b) The advantage gained by timing in
Health education was illustrated when, during the recent
Aberdeen typhoid epidemic every school in Friern Barnet,
secondary, junior and infants, was visited by a Medical
Officer, Health Visitor or Public Health Inspector and a
very brief but very downright talk given on the method of
spread of thphoid fever, which is the same as that in
dysentery and poliomyelitis. The importance of proper
hand-washing after visiting the toilet and before eating and
preparing food was driven home.
In every case the children showed a
lively interest and the school staff were not only welcoming
but very appreciative. nt the same time a display of
posters, leaflets etc., was staged in the Town Hall.
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