[Report 1957] / School Medical Officer of Health, Salop / Shropshire County Council.

Shropshire (England). County Council.

Date:: 1957

Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1957] / School Medical Officer of Health, Salop / Shropshire County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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ducting in Salop and on behalf of a famous Voluntary Trust, an investigation into the needs of and facilities for helping handicapped children, who are indeed a principal raison d'etre of the School Health Services. The latter supplied them with the names and addresses of all the children they studied and preferred our not inconsiderable dossiers for each of the children concerned. As well as effecting such initial introductions, we tried to prepare consultants and family doctors for the advent of these special visitors, and to seek their acceptance and co-operation which was indeed generously given. Thereafter, the greater part of the investigators’ work was done— perhaps wisely and certainly by their own wish—independently of our School Health Service and School Medical Officers until their report was approaching completion when some of the points and cases v^ere discussed with the school doctor concerned with, one hopes, mutual benefit to both and increased benefit to the handicapped children. We can indeed all learn from each other; and the publication of their report will be awaited with interest. Changes in the School Medical Service Staff are more within our Central Office than among the field working medical officers. The latter were indeed during 1957 a more complete and better team and with far fewer changes than for many years, and did good work. Within the Health Department at College Hill, during miuch of 1957 and following the death of Dr. Gregory, Dr. William Hall who, as Deputy County Medical Officer, had been principally responsible for the School Health Services in Salop, accepted responsibility temporarily for the many District Councils which Dr. Gregory had served as Medical Officer of Health to the South- West Salop United Districts. Dr. William Hall’s long and good work for the Districts and for the County Council had received merited recognition before the end of the year, when longer-term mutual arrangements were reached that he should serve several of these District Councils as their Medical Officer of Health. The volume of such latter work to be done has, since 1st January, 1958, resulted in his acting as Deputy County Medical Officer and Deputy Principal School Medical Officer for only something like one-third of his time. This re-arrangement should, nevertheless, carry with it very substantial benefits to all con¬ cerned, most notably in the “mixing” of County Council and County District work and knowledge, and co-ordination of each others’ efforts. It makes available to the County Districts the services, on a part-time and less costly basis, of a widely experienced and responsible Medical Officer of Health, while retaining to the County Council the benefits of his wisdom and long experience of administration and policy. Most important of all is the integrating of the two sides of public health work—personal and environ¬ mental—inherent in these mixed appointments. Dr. Crowley, promoted to the position of Assistant Administrative Medical Officer on a half-time basis, assumes a large and increasing measure of responsibility for the executive work of the School Health Service, though by her own wish she retains for the remainder of her time her field work with school children and babies and the actual immunisation in her own area, as well as organising the B.C.G. and polio immunisation centrally. When the latter are, as we hope, well in hand by the autumn of 1958, it is intended, again by her own wish, that she should take an increasing interest in the programme of Health Educadon in schools and elsewhere, so much desired by the Government, the Ministers of Health and Education, and teachers and the public.