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At a meeting of all the Essex Child Guidance Clinics' Staffs held
in Chelmsford on June 9th, the two subjects most discussed were:—
(1) Preventive work with young children, and
(2) Children in Residential Schools for Maladjusted Children.
It was decided at that meeting that prevention was an integral part
of our work, and that it was important for us to have first hand
knowledge and contact with the Residential Schools for Maladjusted
Children. We have had one meeting with the Ilford Health Visitors
to discuss how best we can co-operate in the preventive work and it
was decided that they would contact us again when they had collected
several cases which merited joint consultation. Meanwhile, a number
of Health Visitors have visited the Clinic and taken part in case conferences
where they have had an opportunity to see how we worked
and the type of case we treated.
A visit was made by several members of the staff to "The
Homestead" at Langham, and we hope to visit Nazeing Park shortly.
Mr. Sheward has visited us, and we have had full discussions with him
over all the cases we have sent to him from this Clinic. It has given
us ample evidence of the enormous value of close contact between the
school and Clinic. Our Psychiatric Social Workers do a great deal
of work with the families of children we have treated and who are now
in Residential Schools, and have done much to prevent parents removing
the children from the schools prematurely, and in helping the parents
to be able to accept the child back home again.
We have had many visitors to the Clinic, and though they cannot
be present during the therapeutic interviews we welcome them to the
Case Conferences. We have had School Medical Officers, General
Practitioners, Social Workers, Health Visitors, Probation Officers, and
Children's Officers. We have had two Psychology Students working
with us for periods of a month, and Health Visitor Students, and a
Student from the Training Course for Teachers of Maladjusted Children,
who have been to us for visits of observation.
Most of the treatment given is in individual interviews, but we
have also had one therapeutic and one observation group for children,
and a discussion group for parents. In the individual work we have
been particularly interested this year in cases of school phobia and
hope to publish some work on this subject later.
We have had an Exhibition of Books for children of limited reading
ability which has been seen by all the Head Teachers and most of the
Assistant Teachers of the area, and a course of lectures has been given
to Head Teachers on Secondary School allocation. Lectures have also
been given to Parent-Teachers Associations. We have continued to
send representatives to the Co-ordinating Committee of Social Workers
in Barking.
Our waiting list remains high, with several months delay for all
but 'urgent' cases, and children who have had a diagnostic survey have
usually to wait for a treatment vacancy, but we hope that our case
load will be considerably diminished when the Dagenham and Romford
Clinic opens, so that these delays can be reduced."
Statistical Summary
No. of cases referred to Clinic 189
No. of cases diagnosed at Clinic 142
Psychiatrists.
Diagnostic interviews 135
Treatment interviews 615
Other interviews 85
No. of Psychiatric Sessions per week 9