View report page

New legislation by which child minders must be registered
and approved came into effect at the beginning of the year. The
large number of applications caused considerable stress upon
my staff resources but by the end of the year the backlog had
been dealt with.
The demand for day nursery places for children in social
or medical need continued and increased. Additional problems
result from the fact that the day nurseries can be situated at
distance from the home, and there are both financial and
humanitarian limits on transporting very young children.
The speech therapy services, which can be vital to both
normal and handicapped children in the establishment of communication,
also came under sustained pressure through the year
because of difficulty in recruitment of scarce staff.
The school health services shared a further extension of
the successful selection procedure for medical examinations at
the intermediate and final ages. Work on the subject of drug
abuse, undertaken in conjunction with the Education and Children's
Departments, Probation and police services, general
practitioners and hospitals, began to show results during the
year and a series of seminars, lectures and discussions were
arranged so as to provide teachers and youth workers, together
with the staff of my department and others, with the necessary
basis to handle this problem.
Domestic Help Service
Some areas of the Borough are showing marked recruitment
problems. It appears that the necessary future extension of this
vital service could run into difficulties as the available labour
force diminishes. The training programmes continued. Greater
public recognition of the invaluable work of the home help is
required.
Welfare Services
The most interesting aspect of the decentralisation of
social work into area teams was the establishment of one team
at the Health Centre where general practitioners and a full
clinic team were already working; especially as it was possible
3