WITHOUT WARDS.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 15113, 23 December 1921, Page 8

WITHOUT WARDS.

A MEW HOSPITAL. A remarkable hospital is about to bo opened -in New York City. It simply bristles with new ideas, but ife salient features are these: It has no wards. T,ho fees are "from nothing up." Tho traditional hospital ward has been denounced to an increasing extent by American medical men foi some years past Its depressing surroundings, a great American doctor recently declared, are "a psychic insult to tho patients." This authority, Dr. Hugh Cabot, professor of surgery at tho University of. Michigan, considers thab under prosent~ conditions hospital patien»3 aro treated" "as though they had bodies but no minds or souls." In tho Fifth Avenue Hospital, a» the new institution will be known, each of tho 300 patients will have a privato room and a private bath. Tho walls of the rooms arc soundproof, so -that tho comings and goings of patients and nurses, sounds of delirium and other disturbances, are all kept from the ears of tho occupants. Tho temperatures of the rooms c-vn be independently varied from zero to the warmth of a Turkish bath. Owing to the peculiar* arrangement of tho buildings, every room has a maximum of light and air. The ground plan resembles a gigantic X with semi-square additions at tho ends of the bars. Fully half tho rooms command wonderful views, for a mile or more, over tihe beautiful Central Parle The rooms reserved for cases where completo quiet is necessary are on inr ninth floor of the building, where traffic noises dwindle to a subdued hum which is rather restful than otherwise.

In the matter of payment, the Fifth Avenue Hospital is particularly up-to-date in that it recognises the existence of that large class of people who cannot afford expensive treatments or operations, but who are unwilling to accept the free facilities of "charitable institutions/' while the hospital itself of course, needs the amounts, however small, that patients can afford to pay. The fees at this hospital, therefore, are graduated according to the income of the patient, considered in relation to his financial burdens. This is the meaning of the phrase: "From nothing up." It does not matter how high in the social scale a patient may be; a poor professional man with a family to support might pay less than a bachelor coalheaver, for instance. In many other ways the hospital patient's smallest needs are met. For example -there are special anaesthesia rooms. Patients' feelings are not harrowed and their well-be-ing affected by being.taken into the grisley surroundings of the opera! ing theatre while they are still conscious. Instead, they are put in what is apparently a cosy sitting-room, and there the anaesthetio is applied.