[Report 1958] / Medical Officer of Health, County of Zetland (Shetland Islands).

  • Shetland (Scotland). County Council.
Date:
1958
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1958] / Medical Officer of Health, County of Zetland (Shetland Islands). Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/34 (page 8)
    provided for long periods by good neighbours. Such cases do not get noticed so easily by the public. 2. Domestic Help Scheme. When a household cannot be kept going Welfare Officers can endeavour to use the modified form of home help service which has been on trial in this county for the past few years. The scheme has helped to spare institutional beds for other cases and has saved several old persons from the distress of having to leave their homes to be admitted to an institution. Conditions in most areas of the county are such that we could not employ a permanent staff of whole-time domestic helpers, as is usually the practice in the south. The cases needing help are so scattered that we usually have to employ someone living in the neighbourhood to help one particular case. The scheme is reserved for cases where no other solution can be found, and at the end of 1958 three whole time and 10 part-time helpers were being employed in the scheme. The demand for the services of this scheme is growing, and it is important that the scheme should not be misused. 3. Eventide Homes. There are 29 beds in Viewforth Home, and a further 13 beds will be available in Leog House when this building is ready to be opened as an eventide home. There are also at any one time usually about 5 Local Authority cases living in the Brevik Hospital. The demand for beds in hostels for old persons is not as great as one would expect considering the numbers of old people in the community. This is understandable when one remembers that most old people are naturally reluctant to leave their home area and to travel into town to live among strangers unless they absolutely have to do so. Consequently many of them prefer to struggle on until they get past the stage of being suitable applicants for a place in an eventide home; they then become candidates for admission to a geriatric bed in the hospital service. In this county the demand for beds for patients needing hospital care is more urgent than the demand for beds in old people's hostels. The average age of those who are admitted to Viewforth is higher than one finds among the occupants of similar hostels in the south, and in many cases they are as a result far feebler than the people I have seen in eventide homes elsewhere. This means that the staff have more work to do. The standard for staffing eventide homes (see paragraph 29 of The Ageing Population - report by Standing Medical Advisory Committee, Department of Health 1953) is in my opinion too meagre, especially if the home is occupied almost entirely by people of very advanced age. 4. Hospital Beds. Old. persons requiring skilled nursing attention are admitted to the Brevik Hospital, and by force of circumstances such cases are also admitted to the Sanatorium (where they occupy about a third of the beds) and sometimes to the wards of the Isolation Hospital. Hospitals should not be used to accommodate old persons merely because one cannot think of any other solution to the problem of caring for them. If hospital accommodation was misused in this way the community would soon find itself with a large prooortion of its hospital beds blocked by long-stay oases. The hospitals 'would then be unable to perform their proper function. Hospitals at any time can only look after a small proportion of the large number of old persons in the community, and the selection of cases for hospital admission is not an easy task. Fortunately, the general practitioners in this county have a wide experience of geriatric work and are experienced in choosing the most suitable cases for the limited number of institutional beds available. At the end of the year extensive structural improvements were made at the Brevik Hospital. The bathrooms and lavatories at both the women's end and the men's end of the hospital were re-built, and two small wards were constructed for isolating patients when necessary.