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28
Post-Natal.
Home Visiting.
The Corporation employs five health visitors, who
are engaged half-time in the School Medical Service,
and in one cases as Nurse to the Dental Service. One
Nurse attends the Wednesday afternoon session at the
Tuberculosis Dispensary and carries out home visitation
of tuberculosis patients.
Table XII. in the Appendix will give details of the
work of home visiting during 1931, a work which is
fundamental in the building up or maintaining an
efficient Maternity and Child Welfare Service. It is
thus all the more serious to record a falling off in this
return, a falling off which is in no way due to the
personnel, but to the automatic increase in the use of the
service, and to the demands of the service since we
appointed a fourth health visitor for maternity and child
welfare in 1928. In all, there has been 313 visiting days
lost each year through these increased demands on the
health visitors' time, and it follows that if we are to
keep to our present standard of efficiency, of which
Bromley is justly proud, the appointment of an additional
health visitor has become necessary.
Welfare Centres.
The Corporation provides five welfare centres in the
town, at which six sessions are held weekly. The total
number of babies on the registers of these centres at 31st
December, 1931, was 1,378. The total number of attendances
at all centres during the year were: (i) by children
under one year of age, 3,890, and (ii) by children between
the ages of' one to five years, 8,015. The average attendance
of children per session throughout the year was 40.
The total number of children who attended at the centres
for the first time during the year: (i) children under
one year of age, 285, representing 46 per cent, of
notified live births, and (ii) children between the ages
of one to five years, 150.
The work accomplished by these centres is indicated
in the statistical table given in the Appendix XIII
The staff of voluntary workers attached to these
centres are doing work of untold value, they bring with