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HELP IN CENTRES
Centres have two main purposes. They concentrate resources (people and equipment) where
they can be economically available to an area, and they provide a meetingplace for people in need
and their agents.
Centres thus provide groups of people in need together with those helping to meet their
needs. Officers with special skills and interests should, and do, visit centres and make themselves
available.
How can we best use existing centres? Firstly, by recognising their potential. Health
Clinics (development sessions for toddlers); Training Centres (for families containing a handicapped
member); School Centres (families attend schools, and child psychiatric teams can meet the staff);
Mental Health Centres (the Section offices, where a clinic staffed by a Hospital psychiatrist is set
up for emergencies, and Clubs); and others mentioned elsewhere in this Report.
Secondly, having recognised the potential of a Centre, we can aim for the right people to
meet each other in the appropriate Centre.
Almost all Health Clinics in the Borough are visited by team members of the Child
Psychiatric Centres. Of Schools for educationally subnormal children, in Walthamstow a special
class is visited by a psychiatric social worker, and sends children to the Centre; and the Leyton
schools get a large share of school visits.
Thirdly, Centres (including Hospital Units) are used for teaching.
Psychiatric social workers at the Walthamstow Centre trained five mental health students
from the London School of Economics course.
Monthly open case conferences are held at the Whipps Cross Children's Unit.
Mutual learning through the sharing of experience is the likely pattern.
HELP AWAY FROM HOME
If people have to go away, they should be as near home as possible to encourage visiting,
and for as short a time as possible.
The psychiatric hospitals (Claybury, southern five-sixths; Goodmayes, northern sixth of
the Borough) follow the prevailing trend of shorter admissions, and co-operate with the Mental
Welfare Officers in the increasing work of aftercare, detection of crisis and prevention of threatened
relapse. The Borough Officers often follow the patient right through Hospital.
Children needing to be away from home have short term treatment in the Whipps Cross
Unit; Child Care Officers can decide and arrange care away from home of any duration; and crisis
within a family containing a handicapped member can be met by temporary care in Hospital or
Hostel for the subnormal, with the hope of a local Hostel which will allow the subnormal person to
keep in touch with his Centre daily.
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