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Dr. Nina Meyer reports as follows on the year's work at the Lordship Lane Centre:-
"Increasingly the pattern of Child Guidance must be that the people in contact with the child should
be helped to understand and respond to the child's difficulties. Many children are responding to
the abnormal circumstances of their lives and the demands of a society in a state of flux and change.
Understanding gives appropriate solutions which apply to whole classes of children in similar
circumstances. The child who has real psychiatric illness can then hope to be able to be given
individual psychiatric attention.
The recruitment of additional Educational Psychologists to the team has facilitated the new orientation
of this Clinic towards Psychiatric support in the form of intervention in schools by discussion and
conference, rather than direct contact of the team with the child.
Our current case load is 287 of which 24 are under intensive treatment by the Psychotherapist.
Of the 227 cases we have dosed, 147 improved with help, 40 were over school leaving age, 24
moved away, and in 16 cases there was no response to offered appointments. 81 cases are awaiting
a school report or Health Visitor's assessment with a view to closure. We have begun to integrate
a policy by which referrals are also screened; only those most likely to benefit from Child Guidance
are seen, leaving others to be referred to agents which can be of most help to them. 179 new
referrals were accepted of which 94 have been seen for diagnostic assessment; 19 children were
seen for review while on leave from boarding school.
Among workers in the field there appears to be a greater consciousness of the psychiatric need of
their population. This perhaps is the important advance in the field of Child Guidance this year".
Dr. K. Graf reports as follows on the year's work at the Tetherdown Centre:-
"As requested. / have pleasure in presenting a brief report on the function and the organisation of
the Tetherdown Child Guidance Clinic during the year 1969. This is my eighth Annual Report since
/ was seconded by the North-West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board to serve in this area as
Consultant Child Psychiatrist, and my fifth report as Medical Director of the Tetherdown Child
Guidance Clinic, which was established in its present set-up at the time of the re-organisation of
the London Boroughs in 1965. The Tetherdown Clinic is the direct successor of the Hornsey Child
Guidance Clinic which began with the appointment by the Education Committee in September 1944
of an Educational Psychologist who two years later, in 1946, was assisted by the appointment of a
Psychiatric Social Worker. The work was extended in December 1947 by the appointment of a
Psychiatrist by the Local Authority for two sessions per week. In April 1948 this establishment
was increased to four sessions but again reduced to two sessions in April 1951, when the
Psychiatrist came into the service of the North-West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board. While
the establishment of the other team members and the demands made on our service have progressively
increased since then, the psychiatric sessions have remained for nearly 20 years unaltered and our
plea for the appointment of an assistant to the Consultant Psychiatrist has remained unheeded.
We are still hoping to get the services of a switchboard operator-cum-receptionist who is badly
needed for the running of this clinic which also houses a remedial teaching unit. Mrs. Benjamin
and Dr. Azevedo continued their sessional services as child therapists and we also now have help
with treatment from a fourth year student from the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic who is supervised
by Miss Anna Freud. The present establishment shows an unbalance of the different types of
professional staff. We are now short of approximately two full-time psychiatric social workers
according to the Ministry recommendation.
As a consequence the present psychiatric social worker has to spend too much of her time on clinical
administration and intake interviews at the expense of other very much needed activities, such as
therapeutic case work with the parents. The Consultant Psychiatrist has to undertake much routine
work and diagnosis which could easily be done by a less experienced colleague and this prevents
him from giving more of his valuable time to consultative work and therapy of his patients.
There has been a total of 250 referrals to the Clinic of which 132 came from Head Teachers. 61 from
Medical Officers. 27 from parents. 12 from the Children's Department. 11 from General Practitioners,
4 from hospital consultants, 2 from Probation Officers and 1 from the Family Service Unit. Of the
250 who were seen by the Psychiatric Social Worker and the Educational Psychologist, 83 proceeded
for full psychiatric investigation which is an increase of diagnostic psychiatric interviews compared
with last year. During the earlier part of the year we were able to follow up all cases on the
diagnostic waiting list which in consequence was reduced from 106 patients in December 1968 to 20
in December 1969. The reason for this big drop was that some children had made spontaneous
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