Notes from a New Zealand Nurse at Berkeley Hospital, U.S.A.

Kai Tiaki : the journal of the nurses of New Zealand, Volume XV, Issue 3, 1 July 1922, Page 139

Notes from a New Zealand Nurse at Berkeley Hospital, U.S.A.

This is one of the largest "Clinics," and takes private, semi-private and free patients. The charge is about six dollars per day for the room, or £1 10s. and so much per day for meals. Each patient at all seriously ill has to have two nurses also at £1 Is. per day. Each operating room charges 40 dollars, or £10, and operations cost anything between 200 and 500 dollars. Each private room attached to a ward has a bureau and clothes closet, a heater, and two small tables. There is a diet kitchen for each ward, and a tray comes up from the general diet kitchen already set. Then the food

comes up and is placed on steam heaters, and is served from the ward kitchen. Each ward kitchen has a huge ice chest, a nickel wash bench, big glass cupboards, and a white tiled wall and floor. The dishes are not washed in the ward, but are taken down to the diet kitchen on the trays as they come out of the ward. You can let yourself up and down in the elevators which are electric. I am on the fifth floor. Everything is done here to save time. In the operating room there are six nurses to each operation. Everything is strange, even to the way the patient is treated in regard to position and otherwise, nothing is given to drink but crushed ice.