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HEALTH EDUCATION
Throughout the year, person to person propaganda continued. Every home visited,
every social contact of the staff of the Public Health Department results in some item of
health information or advice on good healthy living being given, and it is important that
advice should be repeated over and over again, particularly if it has been sought by the
questioner. The whole purpose of the Public Health Department of a Council is to endeavour
to provide an environment in which optimum health can be attained by everybody
and to teach the public then to live in this good environment in a good way so that disease
disaster and crippling injury may not cause the doctors' surgeries to be full, and hospital
waiting-rooms and beds to be occupied.
There is still too much talk of more and better hospitals instead of fewer and healthier
patients. Hospitals are necessary evils but should always be considered as such, and it is
a wonderful thing that children's hospitals, tuberculosis hospitals and infectious disease
hospitals throughout the country have become derelict from lack of patients and that the
surgical specialists for these patients have had to turn to other specialties or do general
medical or preventive work.
Health education by poster and leaflet publicity begins to fail of its effect because of
the pressure of trade advertising, and the ears and eyes of the general public are becoming
resistant to bombardments of propaganda on any subject at all, so that health education
must be subtle and continuous. At a Seminar held by the Central Council for Health
Education in the early part of 1961 this subject—Mass Media in Health Education—was
discussed very thoroughly and it seemed to be generally agreed that television still was a
most powerful force for putting over health education.
In this Borough, all the mass methods are used at varying times and in varying ways.
Posters on topical subjects are displayed on many noticeboards thoughout the town, these
posters being changed from time to time. In 1961 special emphasis was laid on two subjects,
Home Safety and the Prevention of Litter. The Royal Society for the Prevention of
Accidents was having a campaign for some months about the prevention of accidents from
burns and scalds, and the local publicity was timed with the Society's regional and national
publicity. The dropping of waste paper and cigarette ends has seemed to many people to
have little connection with public health but in fact, of course, this is far from the case
and still, in spite of publicity, in spite of the risk of incurring a penalty in the Court, day
after day the streets are seen to be littered with food bags, cores and skins of fruit, sweet
papers and cigarette ends all or any of which may at the start or later contain food poisoning
or other dangerous germs. Children often pick up these dropped articles which may have
a bright and attractive shining surface and so a chain of infection can be established straight
away.
During the period when anti-litter posters and other publicity on the subject, including
press publicity, were being distributed in Southall, a competition was organised amongst
school children who invented and drew or painted anti-litter posters, some with slogans
and some without. These posters were done in class. The best went forward for judging
and the prize winners' posters were first displayed in the Town Hall Council Chamber and
later in the shop windows of a number of local traders. Small prizes were awarded for
the best entries which indeed showed very much the inventiveness and power of observation
amongst the children who were all of primary school age. It is to be hoped also that the
fact of doing this work will have registered a life-long recollection that to drop discarded
articles in the street is a bad thing to do.
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