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89
The practice of emergency treatments has therefore ceased as
from January, 1951. Mr. King has submitted a detailed report
in the body of the report and I would commend your attention
to his valuable and enthusiastic services.
There has been some falling off in the attendances at the
school clinics as compared with previous years and it may well
be that greater use is being made of the general practitioner
service or of the out-patient services of the hospitals. There is
evidence this year of a decline in the need for treatment of
minor ailments of the children. Generally speaking and excluding
the incidence of the minor infectious diseases during the
year, the health and the physique of the Bromley child continues
good as one would expect it to be in a good residential area.
Ill health is an insidious thing, difficult to detect in its early
stages. I have been unable to discover any signs or evidence of
any retrogression. Improving housing conditions, however slow,
will give improved home conditions and it is this factor of a
happy home that plays such an important part in the physical
and mental health of the child. We see, however, an increase
in delinquency, an indication of lack of parental control and
parental training. It seems to me a terrible admission of failure
when parents to-day take their own children to court because
they are out of their control and ask the court to deal with them.
Perhaps this is just another of those tendencies of recent years
for the individual to pass responsibility to the next person. One
also notices a too ready resource to psychology as the panacea
for all the ills of the difficult child. It may well be asked why
the greatly increased practice of psychology during the past few
years has not made for reduction in the number of delinquent
and maladjusted children and whether we would not get a better
and lasting result if we transferred these energies to improving
the house and home care and providing one house to one family.
We tend to give too much attention to the individual and not
enough attention to the family forced to live with other families
in houses built with facilities for one family only. We suffer
too from the administrative fault of too many "home visitors"
—Health Visitor, School Nurse, Social Worker, Psychiatric
Worker, Welfare Officer, District Officer, National Assistance
Visitor, Midwife, District Nurse, Domestic Help Organiser,
Sanitary Inspector, Hospital Almoner, etc., and in some cases,
the Probation Officer, all with specialised functions for purposes
of good. But as most of these officers work for different
authorities and different committees, some local, some distant,
the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, and
until there is local combined effort under local direction and
amalgamation of duties there will continue to be misdirected