View report page

10
THE LOCAL HEALTH DEPARTMENT AND RESEARCH
FOR OTHERS.
It may not be generally realised how much research
work is carried on in Public Health Departments in addition
to their routine statutory obligations. This work is done
voluntarily on behalf of numerous outside bodies that include,
from our files in the last few years, various Ministries,
the Medical Research Council, University of Oxford, Guy's
Hospital, Marie Curie Memorial Foundation, National
Birthday Trust Fund and scientists doing their own surveys.
The volume of this work may even make it difficult
at times adequately to cover normal activities, and if the
local medical officer of health wishes to start a research
project of his own he must give serious thought to its practicability
having regard to other demands on the department's
resources. This was forcibly brought to our attention in the
last few years when this department and the pathologist of
the local hospital group, in co-operation, initiated, carried
out and finally published two papers, one in the British
Medical Journal on mothers' preferences for home or hospital
confinement, and the other in the Lancet on minor
sepsis in the new-born. Both these tasks were, however,
worth the trouble in view of the widespread interest the
results aroused.
The health visitors (medico-social workers who
visit most homes) naturally carry the greatest burden of
this type of field work, but the clerical staff (the backroom
boys) may at times be no less involved. School medical
officers, midwives, domestic help organisers and district
nurses have all been called upon in the past to do their bit.
Examples of this work on behalf of others include
surveys on nursing of cancer cases at home, problems of
prematurity, perinatal mortality, retrolental fibroplasia,
leukaemia, transmission of cancer producing factors in
breast milk, consequences of virus infections in pregnancy,
mongolism, development of school children, effect of infections
on poliomyelitis, and the latest, a survey, to last a
year, of 1,000 children to determine the intestinal carriage
of polio, other viruses and food poisoning organisms.
RADIOACTIVITY HAZARDS.
Three Public Health Inspectors attended a course of