The children's hospital, the medical school and the public / by L. Emmett Holt.
- Luther Emmett Holt
- Date:
- [1913]
Licence: In copyright
Credit: The children's hospital, the medical school and the public / by L. Emmett Holt. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![It is to reduce this excessive death-rate to the minimum [91] that the hospital for children must work. Obviously any such institution which does its duty to the community, and admits very sick infants, will have of necessity a high death rate. This can, of course, be reduced by the simple expedient of refusing admission to apparently hopeless cases. 1 have known institutions which resorted to this in order to make a good showing in annual reports. But it is a narrow and con- temptible sort of philanthropy which would countenance such a practice. A hospital exists for the sick, and the sicker the patient the greater the reason Avhy he should be received in a hospital which is presumably equipped with every facility for saving life. Nearly one-fifth of the deaths in the Babies’ Hospital, in New York, are in patients who live less than twenty-four hours after admission. But if such children were not received, in many instances, they would have died in the mother’s arms while walking the street. For a period of vears in this institution, which receives only infants and children under three years, the average mortality has been about 30 per cent. Something like this is to be expected in every hos- pital which admits the same class of patients. But to hospital managers I would say, do not measure the usefulness of your institution to the community by the death rate, but regard this as an indication of the kind of patients admitted. Year by year as science advances, and your institution grows in efficiency, you will note with satisfaction a steady reduction in the death rate with the same class of patients. Another feature of hospital work among very young child- ren is the frequency of ward infections. Not only are measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough and diphtheria to be guarded against, but more difficult to combat because the means of spreading is less obvious are infections due to the pneumo- coccus, streptococcus, gonococcus, and influenza bacillus. They are responsible for many more deaths than are the common contagious diseases. All of these necessitate the detention o patients in observation rooms before admission to the general ward; adequate space between cribs, or the erec- tion of partial partitions between them to prevent bed to bed ection, hygienic sweeping and dusting; the most scrupulous](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22447957_0011.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
