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of school children should go far to ensuring that children of these ages
cannot be deprived of the food factors essential to their growth and
health. Housing provision is essentially a matter of local arrangement
and looms high in the list of essentials, not only to ensure that those
living in overcrowded conditions might be rehoused, with benefits to
themselves and to the other occupants of the house, but to enable those
living in insanitary premises also to be suitably accommodated. It is
hoped, too, that there will soon be a sufficiency of labour and materials
to permit of the repair and decoration of habitations to bring them back
to standards of decency and of hygiene.
4. Though not spectacular, one of the most important of services
provided by the Council is the help given by the health visitors. Much
of their time is taken up by visiting the mothers in their homes, but
more than one half by seeing them at the different clinic sessions. They
are working here under difficulties inherent in their having to use buildings
not designed for this purpose, and the early construction of suitable
clinic buildings is a matter of urgent importance. At the central clinic
it was anticipated that the Harrow Hospital would provide out-patient
services of every variety, including extensive physiotherapeutic treatment.
The activities of the new Charing Cross Hospital to be erected
near the district boundary might influence these proposals.
5. But for the war it is probable that the new isolation hospital
would by this have been constructed. The original proposal was the
erection of a hospital of 120 beds, with possible extension to 180. There
is a growing body of opinion that as an efficient unit an isolation
hospital should have nearer 200 beds. On the other hand the experience
of this district in the last ten years is that 100 beds would more than
have met all requirements, so the hospital to be erected should not be
much more than this figure. As this is so much smaller than the
desirable standard, approach was made to the Borough of Hendon to
ascertain whether an extension of their hospital to a size sufficient to
accommodate patients from both areas would not be a move in the
interests of the inhabitants of both districts, rather than that each
authority should continue to provide separate institutions. The original
proposal has been extended and the question of a still larger hospital to
meet the needs of Hendon, Wembley and Harrow is now under consideration.
The proposed management of the Isolation Hospital by the bodies
responsible for the provision of general hospital accommodation seems
to have just as little to be said for it as the insistence that new maternity
hospital accommodation should be provided in association with a general
hospital. It is agreed that full treatment facilities should be available
at the isolation hospital, in that to-day patients are admitted to these
hospitals for conditions just as urgent as those demanding their admission
to a general hospital. That is why the hospital should be a proper
sized unit, fully equipped for all purposes, in charge of a clinician
experienced in the treatment of infectious diseases and backed by all
the necessary surgeons and physicians. None of this though is an
argument in favour of the hospital being part of or attached to or