5. In a lying-in institution about three times the quantity of linen and bedding for each patient is necessary of what is used at a general hospital.
The day’s and night’s provision of linen is kept in each ward scullery, and in the scullery of each delivery ward in use.
The linen-store in the store-room, and the bedding-store, need to be very complete and ample.
The bedding, that is, the mattress and blankets, of any one bed in the delivery ward should not be used for more than three or four delivery cases in succession without undergoing some process of purification—and this quite independent of any accident, the mattress of course being protected by Macintosh sheeting.
III. TRAINING SCHOOL FOR MIDWIVES.
The few words which will here be added on the management of a midwifery training school are not at all to be understood as a manual for practical instruction, which it is quite impossible to introduce here, but as simply treating of the management, in so far as this determines some constructive arrangements as imperative, and others as to be avoided.
No charity or institution, I believe, could possibly bear the expense of a single-bed ward, or even of a four-bed ward lying-in establishment, for a pretty constant succession of thirty-two patients, unless there were a training school.
[Thirty-two single-bed wards, an administrator would say, would require sixteen nurses, independently of midwives!!]
Even with a training school, the first year would be one of great difficulty, since all well managed training schools ‘take in’ pupils as much as possible at only two periods of the year, so as never to have the whole of the pupils fresh hands at once. But the first batch must necessarily be all fresh hands. A raw girl cannot be turned in to sit up with a newly-delivered woman and new-born infant. And a midwife cannot be spared to each girl all to herself, to teach her how to handle an infant. [That is, in each single-bed ward.]
The whole nursing service of a large four-bed or one-bed ward lying-in institution is so complicated, so different from that of a general hospital with its 20 or 32–bed wards, that it is difficult to provide for.