LONDON’S HOSPITALS

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 6, 2 October 1941, Page 4

LONDON’S HOSPITALS

Doctors And Nurses Carry On As Usual “London’s 10 leading hospitals remain in the front line. Blitz or no blitz, tbeir staffs carry on. Each hospital is now a casualty clearing station. In a quick tour of Bart.’s, St. Thomas’s, Guy’s, St. George’s, Westminster and the London Hospital I found -out how they work,” says a writer in a recent issue of the New Zealand “Nursing Journal.” Writing of St. Thomas’s Hospital, he says: “The other day I went down there and watched the nurses at work. A long corridor lined with cables, pipes and wires runs under the building, like the inside of a battleship. Dim lights. Boards with chalk signs direct the way to wards, theatres, dispensary and -linen stores. “Down there is a complete hospital at action stations under the abandoned floors and debris. The place was humming with activity. Nurses carry on silently, calmly and swiftly. “Beds line the corridors, each with a few daffodils beside it. Cases are wheeled in.t6 the theatre —once a linen room. Another theatre was once a laundry. A blanket store is now a dispensary. "The nurses have named oue of the cellar wards Scutari because, like Florence Nightingale's wards in the Crimea, it. is dim but scrupulously clean. Makeshift, but. adequate.

‘‘Bombing has taught this lesson: taught us that it is possible to have some system to stand up to even the fiercest of terror raids. Brave nurses will always be found to carry on. “But hospitals should be built in the calm of the country. Never again should we have those great hospitals in the city centres. Clinics for outpatients, yes, but not wards with helpless bed cases.

“On my tour I leaned over a bed. An old lady, her leg broken by falling masonry. ‘I feel safe here. I’m in good hands,’ she told me. ‘I couldn’t be better looked after at home. The nurses are all right.’ ”