Salaries of Medical Officers, &c. £1,800
Medicines, &c. 1,378
£3,178
The cost of maintaining the Workhouse Hospital may be estimated as
follows:—
Maintenance of Patients £9,700
Salaries of Medical Officers 485
Medicines, &c. 1,050
£11,235
The Hospital contains accommodation for over 1,000 patients, and
has often 1,000 in it. The cases at present are:—
Medical 485
Surgical 345
Fever 120
Smallpox 20
The weekly discharges are from twenty to thirty per cent. of the
whole number in the hospital.[3]
The present workhouse staff consists of fourteen paid officers
(who are superintendents, but not trained nurses), and about 150
paupers acting as nurses, but not paid. It has been proposed to
add a trained hospital matron and trained nurses, such as those
trained in the Nightingale School, and assistant nurses, so as to
give one trained day-nurse and one paid assistant to about every
three pauper nurses, and a trained night-nurse on every flat; it
is further proposed to pay the paupers who act as nurses, wages.
The cost of this would be about 2,000_l_. per annum.
Does your experience of hospitals lead you to believe that the
cost of this improved system would be “in part,” “wholly,” or
“more than” repaid to the ratepayers by curing people more
quickly, by curing those who otherwise might have become chronic
cases, and by enabling those to resume their work who must
otherwise have remained or died, and by thus diminishing the
duration or amount of that part of pauperism which is the result
of sickness?
REPLIES OF PHYSICIANS, &c. OF ST. THOMAS’S HOSPITAL.