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provided and as school leaving age approaches an assessment is
made concerning the type of employment or training which is
required. On reaching school leaving age the name of the child
is transferred to the adult Register for Handicapped Persons maintained
by the Welfare Services and the support which is necessary to enable the
handicapped person to lead as normal and independent a life as
possible is continued. This scheme is at an early stage of its
development but an encouraging start has been made. Although
many of its features were previously in operation, it is anticipated
that the continuity of support which is now possible will improve
the efficiency of the services and will lighten the burden which
has to be carried by the disabled person. For this to be done
the help of agencies outside the Council's sphere of responsibility
is essential and close working relationships between officers of
the Council and their colleagues in hospitals, the Ministries of
Social Security and Labour and of other local authorities, family
doctors and voluntary agencies are being built up. It will be
appreciated that for the scheme to be effective close co-ordination
of the efforts of widely separated services is necessary and this
will take some time to achieve.
The policy of population screening for the detection
of unsuspected disease has come much into prominence in recent times.
It should be appreciated that this process is not new, screening
techniques have been in use in infant welfare centres and in the
school health service for many years. Like miniature mass-radiography,
these have in the past been applied on a general basis to healthy
populations and with the realisation that screening techniques applied
to populations most at risk are most likely to produce positive
findings , have become more selective. The selective method provides
a more valuable use of professional time and total resources than
when schemes are applied indiscriminately to whole populations.
Although it is relatively a simple matter, provided that the necessary
finance is available, to establish clinics where the first stage of
population screening can be provided, the extent to which this is
practical is governed by the availability of hospital laboratory and
other services. Priority has to be given to existing services and
at the present time extensive whole health screening programmes for
healthy people could not be undertaken without seriously embarrassing
services for those who are sick. A number of experimental schemes
have been carried out in different parts of the country and valuable
experience has been gained. It is wise, however, to hasten slowly
much more information is needed and new techniques must be developed
before health screening can be made available to wide sections of the
healthy population. It was possible during the year to commence a
pilot scheme of screening for cervical cancer in symptomless women
and this will be expanded as fast as laboratory facilities will allow.
Screening techniques have also been introduced into the new Advisory
Centres for the Elderly which have been set up during the year.
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