The necessary consumption of hot and cold water is at least double or
triple that of any general hospital. Sinks and W.C. sinks must be
everywhere conveniently situated.
There must be a scullery to each four beds; the scullery must needs be
much larger and more convenient than in a general hospital. There is
often more work to be done by night than by day in a lying-in
institution.
All the ward appurtenances, scullery, lavatory, &c., must stand empty
for thorough cleansing, when the ward to which they belong stands empty
in rotation for this purpose, and must not be used for any other ward.
For each four-bed ward, or group of four one-bed wards, or for each
floor of each pavilion, there must therefore be one scullery, with a
plentiful unfailing supply of hot and cold water, with sinks and every
convenience. The reason for this is two-fold:—
(1) To allow each scullery, with the other ward offices, to be
thoroughly cleansed and whitewashed with its own group of four beds.
(2) The work in a scullery and in all the other ward appurtenances day
and night, night and day, is many-fold that which it is in a general
hospital scullery.
Besides this, general hospital patients ought never to be allowed to
enter the scullery.
In a lying-in scullery the infants, most exacting of all patients, must
frequently be in the scullery.
Even under the very best circumstances there are many lying-in cases
among weakly women where the mother’s state is such as to render it
necessary for a ‘crying’ infant to be washed and dressed elsewhere than
in its mother’s ward. These infants are best washed, in that case, in
the scullery, which must be so arranged that infants can be washed and
dressed without being exposed to a thorough draught, and that nurses and
babies may not be hustling one another.
There must be a good press in each scullery. A supply of clean linen and
other necessaries will have to be kept in each press in each scullery.
The slop-sink and other appurtenances must be arranged so as to make
allowance for the fact that the going backwards and forwards for water,
hot and cold, or to empty slops in a lying-in institution—where half the
patients can do nothing for themselves, and the other half (the mothers)
are supposed to be ready for discharge when they can go to the ward
offices for themselves—is more than it is in general hospitals.
Fixed baths are not necessary. But there must be means for filling with
hot water moveable infants’ baths at all hours at a moment’s notice,
since an infant’s life often depends on immediate facility of hot-water
bathing.
And this besides the daily regular night and morning washing of infants.
There must be also a moveable bath for each ward for the lying-in women,
with the means for supplying it with hot and cold water and for emptying
it. Lying-in patients are not able to use either fixed baths or
lavatory.
Glazed earthenware sinks should alone be used, as being by far the
safest and cleanest.