[Report 1909] / Medical Officer of Health, Salop / Shropshire County Council.

  • Shropshire (England). County Council.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1909] / Medical Officer of Health, Salop / Shropshire County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    4/148 (page 4)
    I>ART 1. THE ADMINISTRATIVE COUNTY. POPULATION. The population for the whole Administrative County was in 1891, 236,827, and in 1901, 239,783. In 1901 the total population of the urban and rural districts, containing a small part of Staffordshire, was 240,606, and it is estimated to be 243,238 in the middle of 1909. This is the population on which the county rates are calculated. The populations on which the district rates are calculated are those estimated from local knowledge by the Medical Officers of Health. In some of the districts corrections of the popula¬ tion have been made on account of the public institutions. The population of the Registration County is estimated at the middle of 1909 to be 263,935. It includes certain small portions of the Administrative Counties of Chester, Flint, Denbigh, Montgomery, Hereford, Worcester, and Stafford. It does not, however, include certain portions of the Administrative County of Salop, which are situated in the Registration Counties of Mont¬ gomery, Radnor, Worcester, and Stafford. The registration county is the area used by the Registrar-General for his mortality statistics relating to this county. It is also the area used by the Local Government Board for vaccination statistics. The inconvenience caused by the lack of correspondence between registration and adminis¬ trative districts has been referred to in previous reports. It is principally on account of the fact that registration counties do not correspond with administrative counties, nor registration districts or sub-districts with sanitary districts, that the very valuable information contained in the Registrar-General’s Reports is of comparatively little use to those engaged in sanitary administration. It is extremely desirable that registration districts and sub-districts should be co-terminous with administrative districts. It is satisfactory to find that the Registrar-General is making an effort to reduce the objections to the present system to a minimum, as the following quotation from his report for 1908 shows :— “ Proposals have from time to time been put forward that in order to remedy this'defect the registration areas should be made partially or completely co-terminous with the administrative areas. The obstacles in the way of such a proceeding aie, however, too serious to be overcome except by legislation, going to the length of a new Registration Act. But it does not follow that because, short of such legislation, registration statistics must continue to be collected for registration and not for administrative areas, their publication need necessarily also retain this form. In other words, the area of collection does not necessarily govern that of presentation. Provisional investigation of the question from this point of view has led to the conclusion that it may be possible at a future date to re-distribute the returns (collected as before by registration areas) according to administrative areas, though it will probably be impracticable to publish separate statistics for all the smaller areas.” The difficulties in the way of this reform are very considerable, and they are not confined to the work of the Registrar-General’s Department. It is obvious that if the local and general statistics are to be interchangeable and supplementary, they must be com])ilcd not only on the same general princii)les, but also with absolute agreement as regards the classification of each death. There must also be complete agreement with regard to the allocation of deaths to localities, where persons have died away from the district they belong to. What exactly will be the best arrangement for co-ordinating the local and general statistical work is the problem to be solved, but it is obvious that it will mean a considerable amount of extra clerical and statistical work lor those who are responsible for it.