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parents were ready and anxious to take their children to be treated for abnormalities
of health to general practitioners, hospitals, or even to local health
authority clinics, that wish, carefully cultivated by devoted Health Visitors
through the years, to have attention to, and advice about healthy children to
prevent disability or disease, became limited to the more devoted mothers only,
particularly when Health Visitors became scarce because of lack of training
facilities and the creation of too many supervisory grades Ante Natal Clinics
however, which were linked in this area with Queen Charlotte's and the West
Middlesex Hospitals, did not suffer so badly as in other areas and Brentford
and Chiswick was exceptionally fortunate in having already developed a Chiropody
Service, which was permitted to continue, though it never expanded,
The Infant Clinics recovered after some years and began again to attract
keen Health Visitors, who are the field workers best equipped to improve the
clinic facilities and encourage the use of them by mothers who need help and
some information on the upbringing of infants
But now at last, the Public Health Department is to be responsible for the
whole service, Environmental and Personal and, unless mistakes are made, at
least partly responsible for Welfare and the Children s Services. Here is the
opportunity to make atonement for the wasted years and to make a department
which really serves the people,
Administration must be personal decentralized and helpful There must be
no more passing of enquiries from poor distressed citizens (who, after all,
have to pay for the services) from one department to another Every member of
every section of the Health Department should be willing to try to find the
right person' to answer any problem, and the repellent words "Sorry, I cannot
help you" should be forbidden
The Sanitary Inspection service should continue, as now, to be immediately
available to callers with problems of housing, or nuisance, to be the watchdog
to guard against food or water borne disease, and to act instantaneously to
limit the spread of epidemic diseases
The Clinics should be brought up to the former standards, whether they are
held in local authority buildings or in private practitioners premises, and there
should be a two way traffic, with the mutual good will of the general practitioners
and the local authority doctors, so that health visitors and secretarial
staff can be made available for all maternity and child welfare clinics, with
the simple condition agreed with general practitioners that appropriate records
of those attending such clinics should be available for the use of the Medical
Officer of Health for statistical and research purposes General practitioners
should be able to refer directly to Special Clinics i.e for physiotherapy
chiropody dentistry and orthodontic treatment, ophthalmic investigation,
Day Nurseries and Day Hostels for the Chronic Sick should be provided at
the earliest possible opportunity, to help those members of families who are
willing and anxious to care for their children or disabled relatives but who
either must work to live (i.e. widows widowers, unmarried mothers, unmarried
sons or daughters of sick persons) or who need some relief from the heavy duty
of constant care of children or sick relative (i.e. when in poor physical health),
or when needed in some of the sorely pressed public services because of special
qualifications but unable to work because of home ties (i.e. school teachers,
nurses) Brentford and Chiswick had two local authority Day Nurseries, where
children not only had good care and happy companionship, but where many mothers
learned a great deal of mothercraft, now it has one only, but very many young
children spend the days with strangers, unselected, unsupervised some excellent,
some careless, some frighteningly incompetent.
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