Work Continued

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30919, 27 November 1965, Page 5

Work Continued

AIR conditioning plant which changes the air 24 times an hour accounted for about one-third of the cost of the £200,000 unit for the treatment of burns opened recently at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead. It is a memorial to the great New Zealand plastic surgeon, Sir Archibald Mclndoe, who made this English hospital famous during the war by his work in giving new hope and new faces to severely burned airmen, and is the gift of Mr and Mrs Neville Blonde.

When Joan Pyper of the 8.8. C. visited the hospital, a surgeon explained the importance of air conditioning in minimising the danger of cross-infection.

“The patients are all accommodated in what is to all intents and purpose a sterile unit. The only ways into the building, both for patients and staff, are by a series of air locks. They enter the air lock, change their clothing, then come into the sterile part of the building in which this air change is taking place at positive pressure. Visitors are excluded; they visit patients by means of an outside corridor, speak to them by microphone, and look at them through a plateglass window.” Bending Rules Rules could be “bent,” he said, to admit close relatives of a . patient in a critical condition, or even getting bored with a long stay; such visitors came in by the staff entrance, and put on cap, mask, gown and overshoes. The surgeon described the operating theatre as the most advanced unit of its kind in the world at the moment.

“The patient is brought in on a trolley, the trolley is moved over the central pedestal of the operating theatre, and from that moment hydraulics take over and the trolley top becomes the top of the operating table.

“This avoids too much moving of the patient, 'and also enables the surgeon to have the table put into exactly the position that he wants. The lighting is remotely con-

trolled, and can be adjusted by a series of switches to the exact position required by the surgeon.”

Single-bed rooms, all the most modern instruments and sterilising were some of the precautions against crossinfection mentioned to Joan Pyper by the matron of the hospital. Beds are worked by various levers and sprung in a certain way to lighten the lifting work of nurses, and there is a special lift that lowers patients into the saline bath and transfers them from one trolley to another. She stressed the importance of the psychological side of nursing patients who had suffered the shock and terror of severe burns, and believed that Sir Archibald had done as valuable work psychologically as physically is restoring the confidence of patients in their own appearance and ability. This spirit still permeated the whole hospital.