Hints from the Health Department. Leaflet from the archive of the Society of Medical Officers of Health. Credit: Wellcome Collection, London
The annual report on the health, sanitary condition, &c., &c., of the Parish of St. Mary Abbotts, Kensington for the year 1893
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buildings hurried up as these have been, "the ordinary
work of at least six months having been compressed
into a few weeks." The actual cost, apart from the cost of
the site, was about £117,000, or £292 per bed, a sum
sufficient, one would have thought, to provide a permanent
hospital. It is almost double as compared with
the cost of the North Eastern (temporary) Hospital at
Tottenham. The new hospital is admirably arranged
for administrative and all other purposes. It comprises
16 timber and iron pavilions, (each containing a ward,
144-ft. by 26-ft., for 24 patients) arranged 8 on each
side of a central corridor: the administrative block of buildings
intersects the corridor at right angles, in the centre, and
thus has 8 pavilions on either side of it. Accommodation for
the subordinate staff (including 90 nurses) is provided close
to the boundaries on three sides of the site. The principal
officers are located in the administrative block. The arrangement
of the pavilions, and the position of the main staff
buildings, were determined by the requirement of the
Local Government Board of a space of one hundred feet
between the patients' wards and the boundaries, on the three
sides of the site near to which there are inhabited houses.
The opening of this hospital was not followed by the full
measure of expected relief of the Managers' difficulties, the
Small-pox Hospitals Committee having felc constrained, in
November, to close the "Lower" Hospital at Gore Farm
(200 beds) against the reception of scarlet fever convalescents,
so that (as I had to report in the same month) the additional
beds supplied by the new hospital proved altogether inadequate
to the supply of the then pressing needs of the metropolis.
We were fortunate in obtaining a larger number of removals
than before, but there was still a daily overplus of patients
for whom accommodation could not be provided ; and this
state of affairs continued until December, when the epidemic
had fully entered upon the seasonal period of decline.
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