A Hospital Without Wards

Hokitika Guardian, 5 January 1922, Page 4

A Hospital Without Wards

A remarkable hospital is about to be opened in New York City, says an exchange. It simply bristles with new ideas, but its salient features are these:— It lias no wards. The fees are “From nothing up,” The traditional hospital ward has lioen denounced to an increasing extent by American medical men for some years past. Its depressing surroundings, a great American doctor recently declared, are “a psychic insult to the patients.” This authority, Dr Hugh Cabot, Professor of Surgery at the University of Michigan, considers that under present conditions hospital patients are treated “as though they had bodies hut no minds or souls.”

In the Fifth Avenue Hospital, as the new institution will he known, each of tiie 300 patients will have a private ioo:n and a private bath..

Tiie walls of the rooms are soundproof, so that the coinings and goings ; f patients an I nurses, sounds of delirium and other disturbances, are all kept from the ears of the occupants. The temperatures of the rooms can lie independently varied from zero to the warmth of a Turkish hath.

Owing to the peculiar arrangement of tl'e buildings, every room has a maximum of light and air. The ground plan resembles a gigantic X with semisquare additions at the ends of tbe bars. Fully half tbe rooms command wonderful views, for a mile or moie, o.ei the beautiful Central Park. The rooms, resetved for cases where complete quiet is necessary me on the ninth floor of the building, where, traffic noises dwindle to a subdued bum which is rather restful than otherwise. In tiie matter of payment, the Fifth Avenue Hospital is particularly up-to-date in that it recognises the existence of that large class of people who cannot afford expensive treatments pc operations, but who are unwilling to accept the free facilities of “charitable institutions,” while the hospital, itself of course, needs tbe amounts, however small, that patients can afford to pay-

The fees at this hospital, therefore, are graduated according to the income of the patient, considered in lelation to bis financial burdens. T.liik is the meaning of the phrase “From nothing up.” it does not matter bow high in tbe social scale a patient may be; a poor professional man with a family to support might pay less than a bachelor coal-heaver, for instance. In many other ways the hospital patient’s smallest needs are met. For example, there are special anaesthesia rooms. Patients’ feelings are not harrowed and their well-being affected by being taken into the grisly surroundings of the operating llieirtre while they are still conscious. Instead they arc put into what is apparently a cosy sitting-room, and there the .anaesthetic: is applied.