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103
possible to fill the vacancy until the 1st January 1958, thus
staff for the second half of the year was:- Area Dental Officer,
five full-time and two part- time dental officers and one part-time
orthodontist. The two part-time dental officers together worked
a total of nine sessions per week; in addition to this we had the
services of one more part time dental officer for five sessions
per week for the last eight weeks of the year.
The two Boroughs have been fortunate in recent years in still
having a good proportion of full-time dental officers.
Owing to lack of incentive to take up full-time service as a
career, coupled with the more advantageous remuneration for
sessional work, the trend has been generally for a greater reliance
to have to be placed on the part-timer to provide adequate staff
and then often not very successfully. In this connection it is
significant that it is almost twenty years since an application
for a full-time post was received from a male British dental
surgeon for employment here apart from one case of re • employment
after retirement on pension,
Yet in the years before the war a post as School Dental
Officer was able, in many areas, to compete favourably with one in
private practice, as is evidenced by the large number of applications
when a vacancy was advertised one such case was in December
1936 when there were 106 answers to an advertisement in the British
Dental Journal for a post under the Tottenham Education Committee
81 of whom were men.
The service has been built up over a period of 44 years from
one full-time dental officer in Tottenham to the present establistment
figure of nine for the combined districts,
A clinic was first started in Tottenham in April 1914 for the
treatment of elementary school children only in May 1922 a
second clinic was opened and at this time there were more than
24,000 pupils in the schools, divided between the two dental
officers.
In 1934 the inspection and treatment of secondary schools was
added to these responsibilities.
It was not until 1937 that a comprehensive scheme for the
treatment of ante-natal and post natal mothers and pre-school
children came into operation with the appointment of a third
dental surgeon.