Annual report of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital : 1913/14.

  • Peter Bent Brigham Hospital
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital : 1913/14. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    58/160 (page 50)
    Hospital reports in general vary in their manner of presentation of both these surgical tables, the diagnostic and the operative. On the system which has been fol¬ lowed here — probably an unwise one — but a single diag¬ nosis (the more important one, or the one for which the patient enters the hospital) is included in the table so that the number of patients admitted and the number of diag¬ noses should coincide. If this plan were consistently carried throughout, the table of operations should also coincide with the number of patients operated upon. Just where to draw the line is hard to decide and the matter is deserving of some inter-institutional under¬ standing or agreement, so that there may be uniformity. From the reports of other hospitals which are at hand, it is impossible to glean much that is of mutual statistical value. Thus in the annual report of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in which the white and colored patients are separately tabulated, it is apparent that there is but one diagnosis for each patient admitted, and the operations are not tabulated. In the recent Lakeside Hospital re¬ port for 1913 it is to be inferred that the admissions and diagnoses are meant to correspond, but this is not en¬ tirely clear. There are 2689 diagnoses listed as “total admitted,” and 2281 operations similarly listed in the tables of the Surgical Service. This would mean some 400 surgical patients who have not required an operation, even if but a single operation is recorded for each case. In the 1913 report of the Massachusetts General Hospital there were 3788 surgical admissions, 4249 surgical diag¬ noses and 3935 tabulated operations, an excess of 461 surgical diagnoses and 147 operations over the number of surgical admissions. Evidently therefore there was neither strict adherence to the plan of a single diagnosis and operation for each patient admitted, nor to the plan of recording all significant diagnoses and operations, re¬ gardless of their number, for this would presumably have