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Fortunately, and with much credit to the W.V.S., the home
provided by them at "Southwood," for forty persons, is fulfilling
a great need.
Residential Part III accommodation requirements are complicated
in that there are certain restrictions applicable to an
aged person which make them ineligible for admission, and there
are borderline cases which cannot be classified either as hospital
cases or as fit for residential home accommodation. It is,
perhaps, these borderline cases which place such stress upon the
voluntary and statutory social services for the care of these
patients left unattended in their homes.
Group 4.
This brings us to the provision made for the fourth group.
At present there are seventy-four beds allocated to the elderly
chronic sick in the Bromley Group Hospitals, which cover a
much wider area than Bromley alone. The future programme
of this Group provides for a total of one hundred and thirty-two
beds, and, as at the present time there are ninety aged sick
persons on the waiting list for hospital admission, it would
appear that this accommodation, when provided, will be
inadequate for the needs of this large population, even allowing
for vacancies caused by deaths and partial recoveries. In
addition to the hospital provision, there are beds at many of
the private nursing homes which accommodate the aged sick
at private cost. There are four such nursing homes in Bromley
with a total of sixty-eight beds-these beds, of course, are not
exclusively devoted to the chronic aged sick and few families
can afford the cost. In addition, there are certain nursing homes
run by voluntary associations which provide for residential care
of the aged sick and infirm, e.g., Brook Lane Medical Mission
which provides and manages the nursing home at " Greenhill"
(twenty-two beds), and " Dunoran" (thirty-three beds), also
North-West Kent Housing Society, Ltd., which provides residential
accommodation for thirty-four persons at " Merevale,"
many of whom are of the " hospital " category.
The lack of cohesion in the various schemes for the welfare
of the aged infirm cannot be remedied by the setting up of new
committees, rather is it a case, not of divided control but of
unified control, passing all institutional care to one authority,
leaving the domiciliary care, whether it be voluntary or state,
to another.