The Day to Day Management of the Mentally Handicapped Child in Its Own Home

You have done me the honour of inviting me to speak to you tonight upon the subject of "The Day-toDay Management of the Handicapped Child in its own home." I have much pleasure in doing so because so great a part of the daily medical work of myself and my colleagues and the nursing staff in our hospital is concerned with problems common to yours in the care of these children. As many of you are aware there are at present resident in the Ghelmsley Hospital approaching 200 children under the age of 16 years, many of them infants in every sense of the word, several severely afflicted physically also. We attach very great importance to that part of the hospital work which is included in the children's departments and most of our important advances in treatment, equipment and specialist personnel since the end of the War have been made here. We do not pretend that the hospital can ever fully realise to the child all that is meant by a good home, yet there are children so handicapped that their needs can only properly be met by treatment in hospital and others have been deprived by unhappy circumstances of anybody to look after them. Even for urgent cases, however, it is not always easy to obtain an admission these days and the length of the waiting list is recognized to be among our gravest problems. As a result, many of you are having to devote a considerable part of your day despite your other pressing duties to looking after your child who is backward and therefore needs your special care and this, perhaps, for a period of years. There are unfortunately, little indications that this shortage of beds in our M.D. Hospitals will be overcome in the near future. Other parents, perhaps less severely burdened in other directions, find themselves able to bring up the children who need special care without seeking admission to hospital and this effort does them credit as it allows vacancies when they occur to be reserved for more urgent cases. We, in the hospitals, feel that we are doing something to help you who are looking after your children at home by our system of temporary admissions which relieves a parent of the care of the child for periods of 8 weeks or less at a time.