the onset of the 1967 disturbances. These have nevertheless underlined the urgency of keeping social development in Hong Kong in step with the rapid advances made in the growth of the economy during recent years.
11. For the department itself internal structural reorganization was the most demanding task of the year, and occupied a large proportion of the available administrative resources. It involved major changes in both the structure and the functions of the sections under which the Department was previously organized, and was perhaps the greatest internal reform in the Department since 1958 when it was divorced from the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs and became a separate entity. At the time of its inception the Department was one primarily engaged in the protection of women and children and the provision of relief in the form of dry rations and cooked meals. In the ensuing decade respon- sibilities increased surely and steadily, new sections were added and the number of staff and institutions has grown. With this gradual increase in facilities and with the growth in the number of professional staff the emphasis in recent years has shifted so as to aim for permanent rehabil- itation wherever practicable for the troubles that beset people coming to the Department for assistance.
12. Formerly, various offices which dealt with a particular aspect of social work and the people working in those offices came to be looked upon, and perhaps even to look upon themselves, as people who dealt only with that particular kind of problem. With an office in child welfare in one place, another for handling problems of disturbed girls, another office somewhere else for relief assistance, and other office elsewhere catering for particular problems of blind or deaf or physically handicapped people, it was not easy for the entire problems of some families to be brought into a single focus and such a family might therefore have to go to several offices for different purposes and see several different workers. This had a number of disadvantages for the workers but more seriously it was wasteful of the family's time, money and patience and was not likely to lead to that feeling of confidence between client and worker which is necessary if the client is to be helped to help himself.
13. The decision was therefore made to rearrange all the various casework services of the Department into a single family service embracing all the specialized skills and organized to give service through a number of offices serving particular districts where all these skills
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