HOSPITAL BOREDOM

Greymouth Evening Star, 25 July 1930, Page 12

HOSPITAL BOREDOM

OCCUPATIONS FOR. PATIENTS.

There are in exisbance in Sydney (says the “Herald”) already several sub-committees of women’s organisations, the members of which undertake the regular visiting of most or all of the big public hospitals in the metropolitan area. The Catholic Women’s Association, the Council of Jewish Women, aond occasionally the Country Women’s Association are among those bands of women who perform a valuable social service in this direction. As y'et the activities of such organisations in Sydney have been confined to the taking of delicacies to patients, the distribution of books or other reading matter, or the attention to matters outside the hospital for individual patients. One of the most astonishing things .about enarly all hospitals is the almost ’total lack of occupations provided for the convalescent and the temporarily bedridden patients. After three or four hours’ of reading, even a bookish person finds interest in printed matter prone to flag; and beyond perhaps a little sewing, a game of dominoes, cards, or chess with a convalescent fellow-patient, no other, prospect, of passing the. time until nightfall presents itself.

z The municipal hospitals of New lork, however, according to travellers who have recently visited that city, have begun to set an example which would seem to be assured of popularity, in other quarters as soon as information about their activities -is disseminated. The New York City Visiting Committee, a body of volunteers

who try to brighten the dark days of hospital patients,, have formed an organisation called the Hospital Occupation Committee, which devotes itself to the promotion of occupational

therapy, or, as it is colloquially called, the work cure. The doctors attending the patients now prescribe work suited to their condition, just a;s they presbribe medicine or clinical treatment. “The work cure” is now carried on in ten hospitals and homes. One hospital, which has usually about 1500 patients, has a regular staff of occupational therapy workers, consisting of a chief and half a dozen trained assistants, assisted by as many volunteer helpers as can be recruited. In the grlass-enclosed and sunlight-flooded pavilion on the roof of one building, one can see every day a group of people who at first glance hardly appear to b>e in any wise incapacitated, so perfectly is the work assigned to each indivinual need. At a table two children carve wooden rabbits in order to manipulate fractured wrist-bones which are slowly mending. They are naturally performing clinical exercises from which otherwise they would flinch, because of occasional twinges of pain. Objects /resembling spinning-wheels are really foot-saws and treadles for the pur'pose of restoring strength to injured ankles.

Occupation is given downstairs in the wards, too, where it is greatly appreciated by the crippled and by the persons awaiting operations. Fingers are busied, and minds diverted by distribution of gay-hued wool, raffia, leather, and beads, with information how to make pretty things with them. Such interesting aids for the fighting of boredom and depression are found a. godsend in the neurological wards, among patients, for example, who may need months of preparation before an operation may be ventured upon. Valuable results are obtained among the serious cases of melancholia verging upon mental derangement, by means of arousing interest in these handicrafts.