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PART 2
PERSONAL HEALTH SERVICES
Stuart Crescent Health Centre
In 1965 when the Borough of Haringey was established one of the first recommendations of the
Health Committee was to replace the 100-year-old Victorian mansion which had been used as a
school clinic with a purpose-built health centre.
The family doctors in practice within convenient distance of this centre were consulted and
eventually all the doctors practising within half a mile of the Stuart Crescent area agreed to work
in the new Health Centre. Many exploratory talks were carried out with the assistance of Mr. Madden
of the Middlesex Executive Council and the staff of the Department of Health and Social Security,
who were most helpful with their guidance in the early planning stage.
The crescentic site faces the Civic Centre across the Wood Green High Road and a small park.
A single-storey building would have been out of keeping with the taller buildings around it and
and would also have been wasteful of building land and so it was decided to build on four floors
and to provide a basement car park. The ground floor of the Centre accommodates ten general
practitioner suites as well as rooms for the maternal and child health services of the borough and
for the sale of welfare foods. On the same floor there are facilities for the chiropodists together
with a treatment room and small operating theatre. The first floor includes two dental suites for
the school dental service and normal facilities for the school health service together with a soundproof
room for audiology and speech therapy. The same floor has administrative office accommodation
for the administrative officer, district nurses and the health visitors and a small kitchenette is
located between a small common room for use of the staff. The two upper floors comprise eleven
maisonettes and two flatlets for residential purposes.
The Centre is so designed that the services of the local health authority share some facilities like
waiting space and reception in common so that in the course of time and with the evolution of the
new medical service envisaged in the second green paper there should be a better liaison in the
health services. The clinic was eventually opened in the last few days of 1969 and since then
progress has been made with the attachment of home nurses and midwives to individual general
practitioners for the almost certain benefit of their patients.
The Centre facilitates an improvement in primary medical care which must follow with the increasing
team work by doctors, nurses and other health service workers a gradual progress with an inevitable
improvement in health services.

Family Planning
The family planning service in the Borough continued to be provided by the Family Planning
Association, acting as the Council's agents, the Council accepting financial responsibility for
cases dealt with at family planning clinics who came within certain medical and social priority
categories. The number of cases for whom responsibility was accepted during the year was 214.
Ten-and-a-half weekly sessions were held at clinics, including a weekly evening session at which
contraceptive advice was given to the unmarried, and a weekly session at the Prince of Wales's
Hospital for the insertion of the intra-uterine device.
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