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32
Apart from the Department's own chiropodists, a chiropody service is also
given through the services of the Hackney Association for the Welfare of Old
People, and they do, in fact, provide a domiciliary service on a small scale.
HEALTH EDUCATION
This section of the Act also provides that the Authority may undertake health
education. The Department has a section which deals with this, but during the
year, for obvious reasons following re-organisation, its work has been limited
to a large extent to poster publication and direct health education by the staff.
The rationale of the programme was to take each month a separate topic,
e.g., clean food, immunisation, and to co-ordinate poster and other visual aids
on this topic. The whole subject of health education is, of course, a large
one. Not least are lectures given to school children, and arrangements are
made for nurses to go into some of the larger schools to lecture on various
subjects which although possibly not directly of a health education nature,
e.g., parent-craft, have a definite health education connotation. Although
the subjects of dental hygiene, venereal disease and smoking are of particular
current interest, it is regretted that during the turmoil of re-organisation
it has not been possible to give more than superficial coverage to these topics.
As part of the campaign warning of the dangers of excessive smoking, the
Council decided to include in the lease of sites for advertising purposes a
clause prohibiting the display of advertisements relating to smoking.
RECUPERATIVE HOLIDAYS
Holidays are provided under this Section for adults and children who have
suffered from a recent acute illness and who need a short period of rest and fresh
air but no medical or nursing care. The homes used for these holidays are mostly
situated at pleasant coastal resorts and they include home catering for special
invalid and kosher diets. Many letters have been received from patients
expressing gratitude for the service given.
The numbers sent on recuperative holidays are set out below:-
Expectant and nursing mothers 2
Other adults 312
Children under 5 not attending school 21
School children (including nursery school) 109
SECTION 29 - HOME HELP SERVICE
Under this section of the National Health Service Act, the Authority is
required to provide a home help service for giving help in the home to pregnant
women, families with young children, families where there is physical or mental
ill health in the house, or families where there is need for help because of
old age. The new borough inherited from the former Health Division No. 4,
four home help offices each staffed by an Organiser, Assistant Organiser, and
the necessary clerical staff, with a total of some 550 whole and part-time home
helps. The duties of these home helps are many and varied: briefly they are
expected to carry out the duties that the conscientious housewife would normally
undertake. As might be imagined this can include anything from washing,
looking after children where the mother is sick, to fetching the shopping
where a person is housebound. Their work in certain circumstances can
be very arduous, and some of them display extreme patience and devotion to
duty with some of the difficult cases with which they have to deal. I would instance
one case where, through the devotion to duty of a home help, an entire
family, who at one time might well have been classed as a problem family, were
brought up and were able to reach and lead a normal existence.
In addition, certain home helps elect to work in homes where there are
tuberculous patients: this is entirely at the discretion of the home help and,
of course, in this case, special checks are kept on their health.