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15
MATERNITY AND CHILD WELFARE.
Details of the scheme adopted by the Council for
extending and co-ordinating the Maternity and Child
Welfare WTork carried on in the borough, were given
in the report of 1919, and the work has been continued
during the past year on the same lines.
Notification of Births.—3,866 notifications of living
and 93 of still-born children were received under the
Notification of Births Act, 89 per cent. of the births
being notified against 97 per cent. in 1919. Of these,
2,991, or 75.6 per cent., were notified by midwives,
805 by doctors, and 163 by the parents or others.
Visitation of mothers and Babies by Health Visitors.—
The Council resolved in October last to appoint an
additional Health Visitor, and Miss Jones, who had
been acting as locum tenens, was engaged as a permanent
Health Visitor.
The visits paid by the Health Visitors were:—
First visits to Infants 3,784
Re-visits 5,521
Re-visits to children aged 1 to 5 years 1,886
Visits to cases of Ophthalmia Neonatorum 37
Visits to cases of Measles 1,230
Other visits 183
It will be seen from the above that practically all
the notified births were visited, at least once, by your
Health Visitors, but it has not been possible to pay a
sufficient number of revisits even during the first 12
months of life, and but few can be kept under observation
till they have reached school age, which is what
should be aimed at.
As has been previously pointed out, the Ministry
of Health consider that if the various duties of a Health
Visitor are to be fully performed, a district with about
400 births will be as much as one Health Visitor can
undertake. That there will be a considerable drop
in the number of births this year is certain, but even
if there is a fall of 25 per cent., 2 additional Health
Visitors are required to reach the Ministry of Health
standard.