[Report 1948] / School Medical Officer of Health, Cambridgeshire County Council.

  • Cambridgeshire (England). County Council.
Date:
1948
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1948] / School Medical Officer of Health, Cambridgeshire County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/28 (page 7)
    Visual Defects.—For the first half of 1948 the arrangements for tlie treatment of visual defect remained unaltered but after July 5th certain changes brought about by the National Health Service Act of 1946 came into operation. The children discovered in the schools to have apparently defective vision continued to be referred to Dr. Youngman who carried out the necessary detailed examination and the parents took the prescriptions provided by him to opticians of their choice. Instead of Dr. Youngman’s fees being paid by the Education Committee, however, they became payable by the Execu- tive Council as part of their arrangements for the provision of the Supplementary Ophthalmic Service for the population as a whole under the National Health Service Act, and the cost of the glasses was defrayed neither by the parents of the child concerned nor by the Education Committee. In the same way, the Executive Council became responsible for the cost of the repair of glasses except where it was considered that the repair was necessitated by carelessness, in which case the Education Committee is held responsible with the right of recovery from the parent of the child. The relief to the local rates entailed in the new arrangement no doubt engenders satisfaction, but a much less satisfactory aspect of the matter is the great delay now experienced in the receipt of glasses by the children after they have been ordered. Six months is about an average period with a tendency to increase rather than decrease, and not only does this entail hardship to the child, but in certain cases it happens that a change of glasses is required a very short time after their original supply. Three hundred and forty-four cases were referred to Dr. Young- man in 1948, and glasses were prescribed for 260 of them. By the end of the year they had been supplied to 188, including 4 cases carried over from the previous year. Thus while only these four cases were still without their glasses at the end of 1947, there were 76 children awaiting glasses at the end of 1948. Minor Ailments.—Twenty-nine cases of scabies were reported in 1948 as against 20 in 1947 so that the steady fall which had taken place since the end of the war was not maintained. Still, although the numbers have not returned to their pre-war level, they have become of manageable proportions and it may be hoped that no recurrence of anything approaching the wartime position is likely. The number of cases of impetigo was 50 as compared with 49 in the previous years. These figures are approximately half of those ruling in 1938. There was a considerable fall in the number of cases of ringworm, there having been only 8 as against 25 in 1947. All were of the body and there were again no cases of ringworm of the head. Nose and Throat Defects.—Seventy cases were referred to Adden- brooke’s Hospital of which 31 are known to have received operative