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SANITARY CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE AREA
PART 1 - COMMENT
The authorized establishment comprises the Chief Public Health Inspector Deputy
Chief Public Health Inspector and 7 District Public Health Inspectors. This allows for
one Inspector for every 11,000 inhabitants, whereas the officially recorded average for
the country as a whole is one Inspector for every 9,000 inhabitants. Although this
establishment may be considered to be adequate to deal with routine day to day requirements
it is not sufficient to compensate for vacancies which occur from time to time and
to cope adequately with the added commitments imposed on the Inspectorate by new legislation
such as the Rent Act Clean Air Act, etc., introduced over the past few years, many
local authorities have in fact increased their establishments for this reason. For many
years there has been an average of 3 to 4 vacancies on the establishment of Public Health
Inspectors and because of this it has been difficult if not impossible to operate a comprehensive
sanitary service. For years the depleted staff (down to half of what is
officially recorded as adequate) were primarily employed in dealing with complaints,
applications for Certificates of Disrepair, the training of Student Public Health
Inspectors, of which the Department has 3, and other matters requiring urgent day to day
attention, leaving little time for less urgent work and special duties. However, I am
pleased to report that in September of this year all vacancies on the establishment were
filled.
Although it will be sometime before the arrears of work created by the shortage of
technical staff is completely overtaken, the immediate effect of a full establishment
was to enable the Chief Public Health Inspector to undertake a preliminary survey of the
Borough under the Clean Air Act in connection with proposed smoke control areas and to
commence a detailed survey under the Slum Clearance Provisions of the Housing Act of
properties included in the second of the Council's Proposed Redevelopment Areas.
HEALTH EDUCATION
Environmental sanitation may be defined broadly as the control of all those factors
in man's physical environment which exercise a deleterious effect on his physical development
health and survival. This definition sums up the responsibilities of the local
sanitary authority; the conditions in which people live, work and play, the purity of
their food and drink and of the air they breathe have considerable influence on their
health and well being, and the aim of the environmental health services is to control or
eliminate those factors which are, or may be. harmful.
To achieve this objective the local sanitary authority is armed with a large and
ever increasing number of complicated Acts, Statutory Orders and Regulations, yet it has
been increasingly realised that legislation alone does not secure betterment of environ
-mental conditions and more and more emphasis is being placed on the importance of health
education - laws as necessary and excellent as they may be, are so much waste paper if
they are not appreciated and understood by the people who are supposed to abide by them.
Reliance on persuasive measures rather than punitive powers in the field of environmental
sanitation was referred to in the report of the Working Party on the Recruitment,
Training and Qualification of Public Health Inspectors:-
"Broadly, the function of a Public Health Inspector is a
regulatory one, that is, he is concerned to secure compliance
on the part of the public with certain branches of the law designed
to protect the health of the community. We say to "secure compliance"
rather than to "enforce", because whilst enforcement by process of law
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