Report of the Ambulance Committee.

  • Great Britain. Departmental Committee on the Ambulance Service in the Metropilis.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Report of the Ambulance Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    street cases dealt with by the Metropolitan Police, Probable total number of street cases.' These 399 litters include, in addition t(i tlie 270whi('li belong to the ]:)oliee themselves, BischolTsheim the greater number (48)of theserviccof about 60(in May, 1907,62) Avheeled litters of approved litters, pattern established in 1889 and maintained entirely at the expense of the late Mr. H. L. Ry;i,n, 1555, BischofEsheini. Mr. Thomas E,yan, Secretary of St. Mary's Hospital, who took part in the movement which led up to the establishment of the Bischoffsheim ambulance service and has been Honorary Secretary ever since its establishment, stated that of these 62 wheeled litters 17 are stationed at hospitals, 9 at fire brigade stations. 26 at suitable stations in thoroughfares and 10 elsewhere. Statistics of the approximate number of cases in which these litters have been used in the years 1901-1907 are given in Appendix XII. Besides the Bischoffsheim htters there are also included in the number available to the police, 19 hand litters provided by the Borough Councils, 10 by the London County Council, 16 by the St. John Ambulance Association, 4 in the Royal Parks provided by the Board of Works, and 26 others provided by different hospitals, charities, institutions, etc. 21. Important information as to the working of this system by the Metropolitan Police is given in the returns with reference to the year 1906 which were handed in by the Commissioner of Police, and will be found set out in Appendix II. In the first place, these returns indicate the extent of the problem which has to be dealt with. Thus, in 1906, there came under the cognizance of the Metropolitan Police 8,002 cases of persons injured by accidents, and 2,853 cases of sudden illness in the streets, that is, 10,855, or, roughly speaking, 11,000 cases in all, which were taken by some means to a hospital or infirmary. These cases, of course, differed greatly in gravity. The test of gravity applied in the returns is whether or not it was found necessary to detain the patient at the hospital to which he was conveyed, and it appears that 3,234, or 40 per cent, of the cases of accident, and 1,765, or 62 per cent, of the cases of sudden illness were serious enough to be so detained, that is, 4,999, or 46 per cent, in all (Appendix II., Tables (C) and (D)). We see also that 1,536 of the accident cases are returned as minor injuries in which the patient was able to walk to the hospital. Of the persons seized with illness 414 were able to walk. 22. The question naturally arises, what is the total number of street cases, whether known to the police or not, which require conveyance to hospital or infirmary in the course of a year. This is, of course, a difficult question to answer even approximately, but comparison of the returns furnished tons by the hospitals and given in Appendix I, with the Police Keturns just referred to, enables us, we think, to estimate roughly what proportion of cases actually conveyed to hospitals came within the cognizance of the Metropolitan Police in the year 1906. We think that the 8,905 street cases known to the Metropolitan Pobce (see Appendix II., Tables (A) and (B)) to have been conveyed (not walked) to hospital in 1906, formed about 70 per cent, of the total number of street cases conveyed, and that the total number conveyed to hospital in that year was accord- ingly about 13,000. We do not wish to be interpreted as putting this figure forward as more than a rough estimate, but we have as the basis of our estimate (what has never, so far as we know, been available before) the combination of a series of records taken over certain periods, two weeks or a month or longer, at practically all the important hospitals, to- gether with the complete returns from the Metropolitan Police, and we think that the figure 13,000 is probably not very far from the mark. The corresponding figure for the City of London appears to be about 1,500. These figures, it must be pointed out, relate to cases actually conveyed by some means or other in the particular year 1906, and even if accurate as far as they go, would not necessarily represent the number of cases for which conveyance by ambulance was important or for which an ambulance might reasonably have been summoned if a complete ambulance service for street cases had been in existence. 23. It appears, moreover, that at the present time the number of accidents occurring in the streets of London is increasing rapidly. This will be seen from the Report of the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police for the year 1907, Table 15, which shows that the number of persons known to the police to have been killed or injured in street accidents, after rising from 5,784 in 1891, fluctuated between 9,200 and 10,540 in the years 1897 to 1904, but in 1905 rose to 11,860, in 1906 to 14,272, and in 1907 to 17,055, an increase of 6,515, or 62 per cent., in the last three years ; at the same time an increase in the gravity of the accidents is indicated by the fact that the number of fatal accidents increased from 155 to 283, or 80 per cent., in the three years 1904-7. These figures emphasise the imporl.ance and magnitude of the question with which we are dealing. 24. As regards the mode of conveyance of these 10,855 cases of accident and sudden Methods of illness known to the Metropolitan Police in 1906, in 1,950 cases the patient walked to the conveyance of hospital: excluding those cases, and considering the remaining 8,905 cases we find that street cases. Appendix 11. Recent increase in number of street cases.