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best to treat, or if possible prevent, these evils. The homeless should be provided with homes
—this is the true provision expected from Council housing—to house the needy and the
improvident for the sake of their children. The destitute should be gently helped in cooperation
with Church or voluntary association members, according to the circumstances,
the cause of destitution whether neglect, drink, drugs, mental apathy, or instability, treated,
and personality and self respect restored. The little children, needing care because of
inadequate or cruel parents, or because of the illness, absence, or death of parents, should
be as carefully treated and guarded as if the Department staff were their own parents,
and every foster home, or children's home, or family hostel should be subject to frequent
and unheralded visiting by Departmental professional staff, such as Health Visitors, who
will have the intelligence to recognise unhappiness or fear, or physical signs of indifferent
treatment or malnutrition.
Those disabled by crippling disease, or by deafness, or by blindness, are enough in
number in a Borough of the size of the new one of which Southall will be a part, to require
full scale provision of resident, of school, and of training facilities, and the school for
educationally subnormal will probably require to be supplemented by the provision of
special classes in the day schools, there are still not nearly enough classes for the teaching
of reading to children who have fallen behind in this skill, and experiments in the use of the
New Alphabet, and the Teaching Machine are desirable.
The lonely aged have had a fair amount of attention from the Welfare Department
in the last few years—but the new Welfare Section must do much more. The Home Help
Service should belong to this section, and should be greatly expanded. Meals for the housebound
elderly, clubs and occupation centres to which the over 60's can become attached,
should be organised by the Department through voluntary bodies and a central kitchen
provided for delivery of meals to these premises. A good night sitter service should be started,
and a transport service to convey the disabled elderly to clubs or clinics provided. The Welfare
Section needs to provide homes of a completely different character from those at
present in use, in which elderly people who can no longer remain in their own homes would
have decent privacy, recreation, and occupation if they so desired, and a corner for their
best loved possessions. Privacy and possessions—they cherish these and should not be
forcibly deprived of them. The Welfare Section and the Housing Department together
should organise as soon as possible the building of many blocks of single room flatlets
with some community service and warden, or the conversion of big houses into this same
type of housing—which is likely to save the need for many old people's homes and saves
hospital beds also.
The Public Health Department will need also its own Mass X-ray Unit and its own Laboratory,
and its Chest Clinic should be expanded for the development of other services of
after-care, such as the follow-up of diabetes, gastric ulcer, and other cases discharged from
hospital. Research such as is going on now in Southall on the discovery of unknown
diabetics, can be carried out with the goodwill of General Practitioners if proper assistance
is given. The conditions likely to lead to gastric ulcer, the anaemics, arterio sclerosis and
many other major disabilities, can be studied, and as diet is the most decisive factor in the
production of a great proportion of the diseases of man, aberrations of diet can be corrected.
Training. All this work cannot be carried out without a sensible scheme of service
in-training being established from the 1st April, 1965. In-training is required for all types of
staff, professional and clerical, and courses of training for every grade of employee from
the day of entry into the service can be set up in the local Polytechnic. Thus, before long,
there need no longer exist the shortages in every grade of local governmental staff in public
health departments. The only exceptions are the doctors' and nurses' basic training, but a
scheme of in-training could be prepared even for them so that qualified doctors may acquire
the D.P.H., D.C.H., and other diplomas on various subjects relevant to the needs of the
Department; while hospital qualified nurses could be given help with training for the
Health Visitors Certificate, other social science qualifications in auxiliary medicine, the
Midwives Certificate, or a qualification in Mental Health.
The new Borough has a wonderful opportunity now to create a Public Health Department
which will truly be aiding the people and maintaining Public Health. I had expected
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