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9
National Assistance Board grants, or giving them more independence. The
services required, such as family doctor, hospital bed, welfare hostel, home
nurse, domestic help, health visitor night attendant, sick room equipment,
convalescence, and voluntary help, are either free to all anyway, or in case
of necessity can be made free. Why then is there a problem of the chronic
sick? It is because the services are not adequate and no increase of
monetary benefits to the recipient will make them adequate.
Although further expenditure on the health services cannot fail to
improve them, even that cannot solve the problem. The root of all our
difficulties is shortage of man-power, or more correctly, womanpower.
Ilford, with proportionate regard to its population, spends more on the
domestic help service than any other division in Essex, and with respect to
help for the chronic sick the difference is even greater. The Night Attendant
Service managed by the Ilford Social Service Association is a model for
the rest of the country. So let no one suggest that we are behindhand
in these matters. Yet we cannot do all we want because of lack of suitable
women for these jobs. This is not a local problem, it is a national one;
there are not enough suitable women now, and the position is going to get
worse, to be nurses, school teachers, physiotherapists, dieticians, social
workers, physical training instructors, radiographers, and so on. Raising of
the salary of any section will not increase the pool. This factor, and not
money, will eventually set a limit to expansion of the health services.
Is it then so unreasonable that we seek other means of helping the
aged and chronic sick? Voluntary help, for instance, and their own
families. In the old days of the Means Test unpleasant visits had to be
made to their families to find out what they could pay. It is quite wrong
to think that today similar unpleasant visits are not made; they are, cap
in hand, and also with this difference, that if the family do not wish to
help, the law is on their side, and we are politely, or not so politely, shown
the door. Meanwhile the aged sick parents, may be living in squalor and
alone, and with mental faculties so disturbed by their ageing that they
refuse any help, continue to suffer.
Some Medical Officers of Health have suggested that there should be
a scheme for routine examination of old people and arranging for notification
of those that are specially handicapped, as is done with school
children. This raises many more problems than it solves, the main one
being—what are we going to do with notified handicapped old people that
we cannot do now? If the notification gave the Medical Officer of Health
further powers to ensure help for the aged there might be some advantage
in it.
In many fields there are changes since I wrote my last preface; many
of these are dealt with in more detail elsewhere. Ilford has had its first slum
clearance area approved; a local committee to consider the child neglected
in its own home and the problem family has had its first meeting; the local
health authority has taken over the distribution of welfare foods, with
so far, little disturbance; B.C.G. vaccination against tuberculosis of school
children has commenced, and also immunisation against whooping cough;
plans have been made for two new clinics, at Couchmore Avenue and
Kenwood Gardens, the latter to replace those held at Valentines Mansion
and Newbury Hall; the first meeting to increase co-operation between
general practitioners and health visitors was a great success; and plans for
converting what was Stevens Road Day Nursery into a school for spastic
children are awaiting Ministry approval. The Ilford Social Service Association
has successfully launched a scheme for a chiropody service for old
people. Although the Home Safety Committee has now become a voluntary
enterprise under the supervision of the W.V.S., we are still closely
associated with it. The Mass Miniature Radiography Unit of the North
East Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board visited the Thompson Rooms
in March, 1954, and the attendance was so unexpectedly high that the
public suffered some inconvenience in waiting. Consideration is being given
to more frequent visits of this valuable unit.