Community health services for New York City : report and staff studies.

  • New York (N.Y.). Commission on the Delivery of Personal Health Services.
Date:
1969
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Community health services for New York City : report and staff studies. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    45/704 (page 21)
    With the institution of operations under the affiliation contracts, City hospitals have been shown to be furnished with instrumentation and equipment obsolete by the standards of present hospital practice. In anticipation of this situation, each affiliation contract has provided a substantial emergency sum to be expended at the diseretion of the affiliating institution. Because purchases on these funds have to be made through regular City channels, interminable delays in delivery have been encountered along with error. in. fulfillment of specifications. In, one: hospi- tal after another, equipment has waited in storage after delivery, for rewiring or other renovation re- quired for its installation. Some $12 million worth of renovation projects are now backed up in the chan- nels and bottlenecks in the City administrative machinery. The condition of the City hospital plant ranges from that of old buildings that ought to have been demolished to recently constructed buildings suffering from archaic design and inadequate maintenance. All of the hospitals have been made obsolete by the stand- ards required by Medicare legislation, which call for four-bed semi-private accommodations, as contrasted to the open wards of nineteenth-century welfare stand- ards to which the City hospitals were designed. Much ef tne SIZ million-worth “of renovation is occasioned by inadequate provision for surgery and laboratory facilities. These strictures apply as much to the new Harlem and Bellevue Hospitals, still under construc- tion, as to others because they are being built to design concepts of twenty years ago. The inadequate maintenance of almost all the buildings contributes to the demoralization of staff and patients. Peeling paint and decaying plaster, filth and vermin-infestation blight these places as settings for modern hospital therapy. The crash programs of renovation now under way at Bellevue and other hospitals promise to remedy some of the gross deficiencies but will not cure the obsolescence of the open ward. (c) Waste of resources is evident in the de- clining occupancy of-the City hospitals and over=- erowding-of-voluntary. hospitals, in the deterioration Of Lthe sGity hospitals,.and inthe chronic underspend- ine. oLithe City svcapital budget. for construction» of health facilities. The decline in the occupancy of