Getting Organized
The size of the hospital was a difficult question. When asked how many patients there were, Schweitzer always replied that he did not know.Neither did anyone else, except the nurse in charge of that assignment, and for her it was a running tally. I have a single set of figures from August 8, 1962, when there were 451 adults and 116 children for a total of 567 patients. Eight count of the beds revealed 342. By simple division, there were on that day 1.65 patients per hospital bed.
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Each patient carried a ticket (A standard heavyweight manila shipping tag with reinforced eyelet and a short link of twine): there was a history number (A letter designating the year followed by a consecutive registration number), A name, home Village, registration date, diagnosis, whether the ration was to be issued, and other vital information that might deal with life threatening situations. We suspected that some patients treated these tags as amulets. Sometimes they would bring an old one back to the hospital with them. It might or might not be there own.
There was a 5 x 7" index card in a wooden box at the physicians desk, corresponding to the number on the patients tag. If a second card was needed, a whole was pushed through the cards with a needle, and a white thread was used to tie the cards together. Staples would have rusted. This constituted the entire record, apart from the operating room log. After discharge, these cards went to a central record deposit so that they could be retrieved for future necessity.
Patients upon arrival came to a waiting area under a sign "New Patients", where they waited until seen by the physician who was to become their doctor. They were seeing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays were operating days). Once registered, they were examined, their histories taken, and laboratory studies were ordered. If surgery was indicated, they were put into a waiting pattern for this. The waiting time for hernia surgery was usually only about a week. Nevertheless the link of stay for a hernia surgery was 33.1 days.
Nurses made the rounds, dressed the wound, and removed the sutures. They were in constant and immediate communication with the physicians and were accurate in their observations in superb in their judgment. There was a mutual respect and an unusual collegiality.
There was no dining room for food service for the patients. Their families came with them, cooked for them, and brought their food. There was a central rationales for daily distribution of rice, manioc, dried fish, and bananas. We used about 7 tons of bananas. Although there were no provisions for feeding patients came without families, the nurses always made up "the soup" for these patients in quietly and officially saw to it that they were fed.this was a very personal and intimate form of patient care and concern.
The calendar year of 1962 saw the census for the year at approximately 5000 in patients and an operating room log showed 1000 patients (if bilateral hernias and bilateral hydroceles work done on a single patient, that counted as only a single procedure).
There was a 5 x 7" index card in a wooden box at the physicians desk, corresponding to the number on the patients tag. If a second card was needed, a whole was pushed through the cards with a needle, and a white thread was used to tie the cards together. Staples would have rusted. This constituted the entire record, apart from the operating room log. After discharge, these cards went to a central record deposit so that they could be retrieved for future necessity.
Patients upon arrival came to a waiting area under a sign "New Patients", where they waited until seen by the physician who was to become their doctor. They were seeing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays were operating days). Once registered, they were examined, their histories taken, and laboratory studies were ordered. If surgery was indicated, they were put into a waiting pattern for this. The waiting time for hernia surgery was usually only about a week. Nevertheless the link of stay for a hernia surgery was 33.1 days.
Nurses made the rounds, dressed the wound, and removed the sutures. They were in constant and immediate communication with the physicians and were accurate in their observations in superb in their judgment. There was a mutual respect and an unusual collegiality.
There was no dining room for food service for the patients. Their families came with them, cooked for them, and brought their food. There was a central rationales for daily distribution of rice, manioc, dried fish, and bananas. We used about 7 tons of bananas. Although there were no provisions for feeding patients came without families, the nurses always made up "the soup" for these patients in quietly and officially saw to it that they were fed.this was a very personal and intimate form of patient care and concern.
The calendar year of 1962 saw the census for the year at approximately 5000 in patients and an operating room log showed 1000 patients (if bilateral hernias and bilateral hydroceles work done on a single patient, that counted as only a single procedure).