[Report 1965] / Medical Officer of Health, Dearne U.D.C.

  • Dearne (England). Urban District Council.
Date:
1965
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1965] / Medical Officer of Health, Dearne U.D.C. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/96 (page 9)
    entirely towards the care of the mother and child. Today 92% of the service is devoted to the care of the aged and since 1949 the amount of help given to mothers has decreased by 92%. Constant price expenditure on the care of the latter hbs actually fallen, in spite of an increase of 17% in the number of births per year. The total cost of the domestic help service has increased by 305% since 1949 and is surpassed only by the increase in the cost of mental health (423%). This is due to the very great increase in the total number of part-time home helps employed. The number of whole time home helps has fallen because of the number of married women employed. Such an increase is more remarkable because of the purely permissive character of this function and demonstrates the directions in which local health services are being obliged to develop ; a recent survey, for example, has suggested that the needs of old people are still not being fully met. In our natural sympathy for the aged, however, we should not allow ourselves to forget the importance of the mothers and young children to the future, and the domestic help service should not be allowed to become the exclusive preserve of the over sixties. There is a danger also that if the present tendencies in the care of the aged are not carefully controlled, the family as a social unit may be en- dangered, and it must soon become apparent that a comprehensive welfare service which acts as though old people were without family help has dangers inherent to itself. Since the inception of the health service expenditure on mental health services has increased by 423%, by far the largest increase of any local health authority service, it is safe to assume that this service is still developing and that expenditure can be expected to increase in the coming years. Training Centres with Care Units will have to be more numerous and larger in number and residential hostels both for mentally subnormals and mentally ill patients will need to be built. Staffing ratios will inevitably increase and all these changes would occur passively with the expected rise in population in this country, since there is no reason to expect that the proportion of the mentally ill and mentally subnormal will decline. In the absence of any external measures tending naturally to check population, such as wars and epidemics, the proportion can be expected to remain fairly constant.