Help about the hospital records

Institution : Date of Admission : Date of Discharge : Admitted By : Recommending Subscriber : Ward : Length of Stay : Case Notes : Patient History : Related Admissions

The database contains details of the child’s admission and stay at the hospital, including the admission and discharge dates, the name of the doctor who admitted the child and the length of treatment in the hospital. For a small number of patients, case notes describing their stay in hospital are available.

Institution

The database contains records from both Great Ormond Street Hospital and its convalescent home, Cromwell House. Users can use this field to restrict searches to one or other of these institutions using the drop down list. The default selection from this list is All Records. This is setting is conducts searches across the entire database.

Date of Admission

The month and year a child was admitted as an in-patient. In the registers the full date is usually given, including year, month and day; searches are restricted to month and year of admission.

Both a Month and Year must be entered and both ‘from’ and ‘to’ boxes must be completed. Select ‘Month’ from the drop down menu and insert Year in full.

Hint

The search works by finding records within a range defined as the 1st day of the month of the ‘from’ date to the last day of the Month of the ‘to’ date. To find all admissions in July to September 1868, you search from ‘July 1868’ to ‘September 1868’. If you just want admissions during July 1868, the search would be from ‘July 1868’ to ‘July 1868’.

Date of Discharge

Not searchable. This information was included in the Register and is included in the Admission Record Display and the downloadable version of the Results Table. The date of discharge was used to calculate the Length of Stay data.

Admitted By

Many records included the name of the doctor who approved a child’s admission to the Hospital. Admissions can be located for specific doctors by selecting from the drop down menu. As in modern practice, the use of the title Dr implies the practitioner was a physician and the title Mr, a surgeon.

Several abbreviations are used in the Registers:

AHS - Assistant House Surgeon
CMO - Consultant Medical Officer
HP - House Physician
HS - House Surgeon
RMO - Resident Medical Officer

Recommending Subscriber

Not searchable.  It was frequently recorded in the registers, in the earlier years, but was almost obsolete by the early 1890s, when the practice of requiring patients to have letters (or tickets) of introduction from one of the hospital’s supporters began to die out. In the Admission Record Display and downloadable results table, as entered in the Register.

Ward

Not searchable. Indicates the ward the patient was admitted to. In some cases a child was admitted to one ward and moved to another, and this is also indicated in the record – the two wards being separated by semi colons. For more information on ward names see the article  in the Library ‘The Ward Names at Great Ormond Street’. At Cromwell House there were two wards, the chronic and surgical ward for children who required nursing care, but were no longer sick enough to occupy valuable acute beds in the main hospital; and the convalescent ward, for children who were truly convalescing.

Length of Stay

Records the length of time the child stayed in the Hospital as an in-patient. Although the Registers sometimes recorded this statistic, in the database Length of Stay has been calculated from admission and discharge dates.

Search in a range of days.

Case Notes

A small number of case notes relating to children at the hospital are available on the website. The case notes were compiled by Dr Charles West, one of the founders of the Hospital for Sick Children and cover the period 1852 to 1874. They represent an opportunity to read in detail about the medical treatment and care given to sick children in the early days of paediatric medicine. The case notes have been scanned and are presented as a series of pdf files, which can be viewed on screen or printed. They are accessed via the admissions record of the child to which they relate.

To locate records with case notes, click on the ‘Has case notes?’ box on the Search Form. This can be used on its own to find all records with case notes, or combined with other terms to find specific case notes.

Hint

As there is only a very small percentage of records with case notes it is advisable to keep any searches for case notes as broad as possible.

Patient History

A small number of Cromwell House records include information on a patient’s history of childhood diseases and a flag indicating whether or not vaccinated against small pox. It appears in the full record display as a list of childhood diseases already encountered, and a statement that the child has or has not been vaccinated against small pox. At this information was only provided for a small number of children it is not searchable, but where available it is reproduced in the full record.

Related Records

The database contains separate admissions records for the main hospital at Great Ormond Street and the convalescent home, Cromwell House. But many of these admissions are related, as children were often discharged from the main hospital to the convalescent home, and some were even returned to the main hospital when their condition deteriorated. Where this is the case, the records have been linked together and the list of related admissions is reproduced at the end of the full record display. This list acts as links to the related records, organised in chronological order, so a user can easily follow a child’s progress through the hospital’s various facilities. (See John Bartlett, admitted in August 1881, as an example of this – the child was moved seven times between the hospital and the convalescent home.)

At present these links only bring together admissions for continuous stays within the two institutions. If a child was sent home (or to another institution) and then readmitted to Great Ormond Street or Cromwell House at a later date, such subsequent admissions are not linked to the original, but counted as separate events.

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