These are six-storey buildings with an assembly hall on the ground floor and various other facilities on the upper floors such as day nurseries, libraries and clubs. These centres are managed by the Social Welfare Department, but many of the projects housed in them are run by voluntary agencies.
95. Much of the estate welfare work, as elsewhere in Hong Kong, is carried out by religious and other welfare agencies. Some of these are branches of parent organizations overseas, but many others are of purely local origin and all rely heavily on social workers recruited in Hong Kong.
96. Recreation areas are included in all resettlement estates. These may take a variety of forms: pitches for football, basket-ball and other forms of active recreation, children's playgrounds equipped with swings, slides, and other attractions, or rest gardens and sitting-out areas. The areas are formed, surfaced and fenced during the construc- tion of the estate, and then handed over to the Urban Services Depart- ment to equip and manage. 13 playgrounds (including one on the rooftop of a block at Tsz Wan Shan estate) were opened by Urban Councillors during the year. With the assistance of the Urban Services Department, a programme for planting trees and shrubs in all estates. was continued. These provide much-needed breaks in the endless vistas of concrete, as well as welcome shade; they also help to con- solidate slopes in the terraced estates. It is hoped that new techniques which enable more mature trees to be transplanted will result in a higher survival rate than in earlier schemes of this kind.
97. Although most of the urban population need not travel more than a mile to a Government medical clinic, one of the features of resettlement estates for some years was the number of vans converted into makeshift 'mobile' clinics and run by a variety of agencies. At the end of 1967, the Medical and Health Department introduced a scheme to replace them by low-cost clinics in the charge of qualified or exempted medical practitioners, and accommodated in the ground floors of domestic blocks. Since the introduction of this scheme, 46 such clinics have been allocated of which 37 were in operation by the end of March (this is in addition to the 33 clinics operated in estates by Government or welfare organizations).
98. Appendix 6 gives details of welfare services in estates.
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