Annual report : 1938 / Birmingham United Hospital.

  • Birmingham United Hospital.
Date:
1938
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report : 1938 / Birmingham United Hospital. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    now become acute, and it is becoming more and more difficult to find sufficient student nurses to maintain the standard of nursing service within the Hospital. The system of admission of patients has attracted Admission considerable attention in the past few months. Patients. The Board does not wish to make any special pro¬ nouncement on this. Its one anxiety is to ensure that patients requiring the services of the Hospital can obtain them without undue delay, and any well-planned system which will help in this direction will receive the sympathetic support of the Board. Beds are being specially set aside at all three units of the United Hospital and used solely for the purpose of admissions from the general waiting lists. All patients who are seen in the Out-patient Departments, whose conditions, whilst needing in-patient treatment, are not of any specially urgent character, are placed on these waiting lists. Such patients are admitted strictly in the order in which they are entered on the lists. The ready co-operation of the Medical Staff in these arrangements is appreciated by the Board. It should be noted, however, that not only the United Hospital but all the great voluntary hospitals throughout the country, have, particularly in view of the strides made by the municipal hospitals in the treatment of the acute sick, developed to a very large degree a specialised service of a definite and distinct character. General physicians and surgeons are tending more and more to concentrate their studies and work in some specialised direction, and the more advanced opinion in the medical profession freely acknowledges that it is necessary for them to do so. Modern methods of medical and surgical treatment are becoming increasingly exacting, and any one individual can no longer deal with the whole range of conditions in the way demanded by advancing know¬ ledge and technique Reasonable discrimination, subject always to the •immediately urgent needs of the patient, must be employed to ensure that the services of the right man are available at the moment he is most wanted. With this general comment it is only necessary to repeat that the Board will gladly co-operate in any of