3-
20
by the Directors.
The hospital accommodation in the
Colony has not kept pace with the growth of the population,
and it is more than ever important today that these institutions should be used to the fullest possible extent
for the treatment of the sick.
6.
This object cannot be said to have been attained
under present conditions. In the first place, the
hospitals provide places of refuge for a number of senile,
crippled or destitute persons, proper inmates of an
infirmary, occupying beds required for patients whose
condition needs treatment in a hospital. In the second
place, a number of wards are set apart for the accommodation
of patients under treatment by Chinese practitioners of
herbal medicine. Historically the parent hospitals at
least were founded and endowed for this purpose, and the
admission of Western medicine came about almost by accident.
The modern section has grown until during 1937 the number
of in-patients treated in the Western wards of the three
hospitals numbered 26,889, compared with 16,442 in the
herbalist wards.
7.
Apart from the difficulties connected with the
administration of an institution combining two different
systems, inefficient treatment and diagnosis in the
herbalist wards has resulted, in a number of cases, in the
retention in those wards for unduly long periods of
patients who if treated by more efficient methods would
have been speedily discharged, and even of the admission
of persons who were not in need of hospital treatment at
all. In this way overcrowding, already serious, became
accentuated, and early in the present year the Committee
voluntarily adopted a policy of reducing the number of
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