The bed clothes are changed after each delivery, and the beds, which are of straw, after every third delivery.
The patients consist for the most part of unmarried women.[[17]] They are admitted into the pregnant wards, where they remain for a varying interval of from days to months, from whence they are removed to the delivery ward; about a fifth part of the women are admitted directly from the town to the delivery ward.
They remain on an average eight hours in the delivery room, whence they are removed to the lying-in ward, where they remain five or six days. They are then admitted to the convalescent ward, and are finally discharged fourteen days after labour, one half to the town, the other half into other parts of the workhouse.
An important part of the management is that the inmates of the pregnant wards only inhabit those wards at night, being engaged during the day in various occupations within the workhouse, but not about the lying-in women, as in the Paris Maternité.
Cases are not taken into the lying-in division unless labour has begun, or is supposed to be imminent.
Any case of illness occurring in the lying-in department is at once removed to the ‘class sick nursery,’ to the lock or other division.
The nurses engaged in the lying-in division attend also cases in the ‘class sick nursery,’ and are periodically changed. Any case which they cannot manage is referred to the resident medical officer on duty.
There are three of these officers, who relieve each other every eight hours day and night. The officer on duty is liable to be called on to visit any part of the workhouse or hospital during his turn of duty, so that it might happen occasionally that the medical officer might be called from the hospital to the lying-in division.
If feverish symptoms show themselves in any patient in the lying-in division, the practice is to isolate the case or to transfer it to some other division of the workhouse. The ward is then closed, fumigated, cleansed, and lime-washed, before being again used.
This proceeding has only been necessary twice within the last four years.