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the supervision of the Non-medical Supervisor of Midwives, Mrs.
Bromley.
3. Home Helps.
The County Council, as local health authority, provides domestic
helps to households where such help is required because of illness, or
the lying-in of an expectant mother, because of anyone who is mentally
defective or is aged or because of children not over compulsory school
age.
Home Helps are engaged full-time or part-time; they are paid by
the Authority. According to the financial circumstances of the household,
part or all of this expenditure is recovered from those who are
helped.
Although in essence an emergency service or at least one which it is
intended shall be provided for short periods only, many of those who
are assisted need continual help because their difficulty is not so much
that they cannot find someone to help them as that they cannot afford to
pay for that help. This applies more especially when the help is given to'
families where there is a member suffering from tuberculosis or where
help is being given to the aged or to the chronically incapacitated. As
contrasted with the arrangements for the engagement of nurses and midwives,
the allocation of duties of home helps is made by the organiser
of the service, Mrs. Chilvers, who works from the Area Health Office
at " Kynaston Court" (Tel. No.: Grimsdyke 3131).
DAY NURSERIES
The County Council as local health authority continues to maintain
the four day nurseries for which the Harrow Council was responsible in
1948, these being at Spencer Road, Wealdstone; Walton Avenue, South
Harrow; Kenmore Road, Kenton; and Headstone Drive, Wealdstone.
Each of these nurseries was well attended until towards the end of
the year when the County Council altered the arrangements for the
admission of children to these nurseries. This revision, which resulted
in the exclusion of many children, partly because the financial circumstances
of the parents of some of the children was above the standard
set down, partly because many parents withdrew their children as they
felt they could not afford to pay the higher charges which they were
being assessed to make. From the time that these new charges came
into effect, the attendances at the nurseries have been in general something
under one half the number of places. The County Council had
previously considered the needs of the various areas for day nurseries
and had decided that the need in this district could be met by three
nurseries The difficulty about this decision is that the two nurseries
most closely situated are those which are best attended, so that the case
for the retention of each of these is greater than that for the retention
of either of the others. On the other hand, the distance of any other
nursery from either of the other two is so great that real hardship would
be imposed on the mothers of children at either of these nurseries if it