Annual report of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital : 1924.

  • Peter Bent Brigham Hospital
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital : 1924. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    does not have the time to give that personal relation¬ ship common twenty years ago. Necessarily both patient and doctor lose by this situation. The patient, unable to carry out the physician’s order, is discouraged and helpless, and the physician, under¬ standing but unable to help, loses the knowledge and the experience of the effect of his treatment for his patients. Most doctors now realize the futility of prescribing a long period of rest and a nutritious diet to the woman who has seven small children and whose husband is out of work, without social service. Doctors have also come to know that in special classes or clinics, such as cardiac, diabetic, and goitre clinics, where patients with a common disease come at regular intervals covering a considerable period of time, the success of the clinic largely depends upon the hospital social worker. She it is who does the fol¬ low-up, gives much of the instruction, visits the home, attends to the problems she meets there, and reports to the physician any significant data. But her interest is not confined to the individual nor to the special group, but to the entire intake of the hospital. She has a keen sense of the responsibility of the hospital as a whole, to the needs of the patients and to the community. The time has come when the hospital Staff looks beyond the four walls of the hos¬ pital to a better understanding of the environment from which our patients come, and that to which they return. Of what avail to correct a physical disability if there are conditions in the home and the community which kill the spirit and destroy the soul ? This development of the social viewpoint of the hos¬ pital is apparent in many hospitals. At the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital the head worker in the Social Service Department assisted in establishing a system