The Relationship of the Child Welfare Officer and the School Medical Officer To the National Health Service

Broad divisions of preventive and curative medicine can arbitrarily exist, but there should be a wide overlap and increasing effort should be made to bring all our medical forces together in a comprehensive attack upon any factors contrary to mental and physical welfare and health in infancy and childhood. Officers in the maternity and child welfare, and school medical services, will neces sarily need to have a closer and increasing liaison with other forms of preventive and clinical practice. The identity of these officers can be retained (and must be so for some years), but the overall value in the national health service will depend on a wider fusion with consultants, especially obstetricians and pædiatricians, on the one hand, and on the other (especially in health centres) with general practitioners, and particu larly with those comprising the personnel of group general practice. Most especially in the field of child health, preventive and curative activity can proceed hand-in-hand and in fact must do so to maintain fruitful results. Pædiatricians, infant welfare officers, and school medical officers have wide overlaps in their interests and duties ; to some extent a mutual interchange of work in children's hospitals and in welfare departments already exists in several large centres. Clinical area pædia tricians should organize, with the local preventive medicine authorities, arrangements for a comprehensive child health programme in the area and so act as joint influences in promoting the very best co-operative work, and particularly in its educational preventive aspects.