Further Studies in Hospital and Community [antikvár]

The General PictureThe three studies now presented stem naturally fronn Hospital and Community^, a report which dealt with the histories of 705 men discharged after treatment in acute medical wards of four hospitals in the West of Scotland. One-third of these patients had already had one or more spells of in-patient treatment, or out-patient hospital care, for the condition responsible for their recent hospital admission, or for one closely related, within the 5 years immediately preceding the admission on which the study was based. Of the 705 men discharged, 10 per cent, died within three months of leaving hospital, 5 per cent, had been re-admitted and a further 10 per cent., seen in their own homes three months after discharge, had clearly deteriorated; so that about one-quarter of the men had gone downhill. Three hundred and seven of the original 705 had returned to work within three months of discharge from hospital, but about one-fifth of these were in unsuitable jobs. Nor was the picture any brighter 2 years after the men left hospital. By then a quarter of the original number had died, many after further spells of hospital treatment. It was estimated that of those still alive two-thirds had derived substantial and lasting benefit from hospital care, one fifth had not improved, and the balance (13 per cent.) were obviously worse than they had been on discharge. Twenty-seven per cent, of the survivors had had additional spells of in-patient hospital treatment, over a quarter of them more than one. Nearly one-third of the survivors had worked for less than one of the 2 years since leaving hospital; many had done no work during that period.Many of the patients treated suffered from gross disease, sometimes responding dramatically to hospital treatment but prone to relapse when the patient returned home, so that in the aggregate a considerable proportion of the available beds in the best of our hospitals was occupied by a comparatively small number of patients, people who kept on breaking down in health at short intervals and requiring to be admitted again