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The constant monitoring of air, water and food are vital for the exclusion of pollutants and
for ensuring that those substances are present which in minute quantities build the foundations of
health — vitamins, minerals (flouride in water which a vociferous minority deny to all) and others.
Not only is it the duty and responsibility of the Council to provide a healthy external
environment, but an internal one also, and this means persuasion of people not to smoke, persuasion
of people to handle food in ways which do not give rise to all sorts of disease, and many other
things. Waltham Forest, which has done so much for buildings, engineering works with health
implications and clean air to name but three, must now bring much greater weight to bear in all
that is implied in Health Education. Persuasion of men, women, boys and girls in all that leads to
their health is hard work, needs proper resources, and offers great rewards.
This report, addressed as it is to members of the Council, has nevertheless a wider readership
and to each reader may I say sincerely and personally as I say on posters in a number of
buildings "In the interests of your own health and for the benefit of others please refrain from
smoking". The cigarette is a killer. The cigarette leaves families fatherless. The cigarette makes
chronic invalids. The cigarette is socially offensive to some people. If you smoke cigarettes
please, oh please, listen to what is being said. Listen again — and give it up.
The concept of health as an absolute — as total physical, mental and social wellbeing — is
now becoming old hat, for common observation indicates that it is an ideal concept very rarely
found in real life. But the more modest objective of health as the ability to live a full life in which
one's little infirmities are tolerated within a general resilience has very real administrative
implications.
Sheltered housing with warden service is a theme which must continue to be hammered
home. So often the entire rationale of using this form of housing is misunderstood. If only, someone
says, this or that old lady who is borderline for an old persons' home could be in a "warden flat".
But what would be the result? If a block of warden flats was filled with such people, before long
many would cross the borderline at an age when they could not adapt and would really need the
facilities of an old persons' home. The state of affairs would then be an inappropriately and
extravagantly designed old persons' home, hampered by unsuitable staffing arrangements.
Housing of this kind is not only for old people, but in their case admission must occur at
an age when they are still able-bodied, having years ahead of them in which to form links with the
social matrix of the area, and indeed with others in the same block, so that as infirmity increases
they have built up a resilience to cope with it. This is why small numbers of such flats make so
little impact on the problem. The need is for a large pool of this type of housing lightly staffed,
not for a small pool heavily staffed. The minute of the Health and Welfare Committee, approved by
the Council on the 24th February, 1967 that "a target be approved for the provision of 300 dwellings
a year for elderly people with some form of warden service" was nothing less than realistic, if
daunting in terms of resources.
The Severely Subnormal need local residential provision. This is part of a national strategy
of rescuing them from a situation built up when mass production methods of care were felt
necessary for smaller numbers than now exist. A situation has now been reached where a basic
under-provision and historic lack of imagination in large hospitals up and down the country is
causing occasional scandals to burst through the fog of public apathy. The public now at last
demands that something should be done.
The difficulties of the Royal Eastern Counties Hospital which cares for our subnormal
patients from its large blocks of buildings 50 miles away are matched by the greater and much
appreciated efforts of the staff to overcome them, but such a state of affairs must be improved and
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