Annual report of the Board of Control : 12th, 1925.

Date:
1925
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Annual report of the Board of Control : 12th, 1925. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    61/482 (page 51)
    Though not strictly comparable with the foregoing arrange¬ ments, it is fitting to mention here the extensive amount of out-patient work carried out in connection with the Royal Bethlem Hospital and at the Maudsley Hospital. At the South London Hospital for Diseases of the Nervous System, a branch of Bethlem, which was established in 1919 solely for out-patients, 752 patients, with over 4,000 attendances, were treated during 1925 by the Hospital’s medical staff—advice being available twice weekly for cases of mental disorder and once a week for mental defectives. At the Maudsley Hospital out-patient work was commenced in 1923, and last year over a thousand patients were treated—400 males and 650 females. Mutual arrangements between General and Mental Hospitals.— However great be the efficiency of the treatment offered, and though the number of out-patients treated at mental hospitals is increasing, we fear that prejudice may at present deter some incipient and early mental cases from presenting themselves at the out-patient department of a mental hospital. For this and other reasons we have thought it wise wherever practicable to advocate the provision of out-patient treatment at the general hospital rather than at the mental hospital, and to suggest that, by mutual arrangement between the governing authorities of the two hospitals, the expert services of the mental hospital staff should be available at the general hospital. There are a large number of general hospitals possessing a strong honorary medical staff but no Honorary Physician in mental and nervous disorders; where this is so, we see many and mutual advantages in the Medical Superintendent of the mental hospital being appointed by the general hospital as their Honorary Physician in this special branch of medicine. Out-patient treatment is work which the Visiting Committee should, we think, encourage and which, if properly organized and successful, cannot fail eventually, and perhaps more speedily than might be anticipated, to tend to diminish the demand upon the Committee to provide institutional accommodation. The mental hospital’s medical staff can sometimes help this movement; but in some instances it may be difficult and perhaps invidious for a Medical Superintendent to bestir himself actively in the matter. We have accordingly on several occasions ourselves suggested conferences to further the movement and have willingly arranged that one of the Commissioners should attend and address a locally convened meeting of representatives of the mental hospital and of general hospitals within the area. We are satisfied that these conferences and meetings have not been in vain. Mental Cases not originally excluded from General Hospitals. —The exclusion of mental cases from general hospitals was not originally the policy of those institutions, and, though in almost all of them it is now rigorously maintained, it is doubtful if it can be said to have emanated from them.