PATIENTS ACTIVE

Waikato Times, Volume 128, Issue 21361, 4 March 1941, Page 8

PATIENTS ACTIVE

DOMINION SOLDIERS HOSPITAL IN EGYPT (From the Official War Correspondent with the New Zealand Forces in the Middle East) EGYPT, Fob. 6 In an attractively untidy room in the New Zealand General Hospital, a bench is covered with half-finished model locomotives, mechanised toys and domestic articles, and there as a smell of paint and glue in the air. This little workshop is the home of an activity which the medical officers call “occupational therapy,” but which mjght more simply be termed exercise of the mind and the hands. Doctors find that there are three classes of hospital patients who may derive remarkable benefits when they are given constructive work of this sort to do. There are those who are confined to bed for long periods and whose minds tend to become “stale” through the monotony of inaction. Secondly, there are the patients suffering from mental stress and disorders, whose condition may only be made worse by idleness; and, thirdly, in a much different class, those who have lost the use of certain muscle groups as a result of injury or possibly amputation. Those are the facts behind the not unusual sight of a soldier-patient knitting or doing some other form of handwork as he lies in bed, and of a convelescent bending over a mechanical toy on a workshop bench. The sale of the toys and other articles made by the men puts occupational therapy on a self-supporting basis, and it* is hoped that the work will be made a recognised branch of the New Zealand military hospital activity.