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VI. HOSPITALS, DISPENSARIES AND SOCIAL HYGIENE CLINICS.
158. Return B appended to this report provides details of Naval, Military, Government Civil, Chinese and private hospitals in Hong Kong. Reference has been made in an earlier section of this report to the findings and recommendations of the Technical Committee for the Reorganization and Improvement of Existing Official Hospital and Clinical Facilities of the Colony of Hong Kong and these are given as Appendix II.
159. Certain important additions to hospital accommodation effected during 1939 are worthy of record.
(a) The levelling of the site for the new infectious diseases hospital and, later, the new general hospital on the Kowloon Medical Centre made good progress and should be completed in the early autumn of 1940.
(b) A small six-bed infectious diseases block was opened early in 1939 at Kowloon Hospital to house cases most in need of isolation.
(c) Accommodation was provided for the staff and for sixty-nine female patients in the former sisters' quarters at the Government Civil Hospital and effected a very great improvement in the overcrowded condition of the Mental Hospital.
(d) New quarters for the matron and midwives in training were provided on the roof of the Tsan Yuk Government Maternity Hospital. Hospital huts were built in all four of the urban camps for refugees, destitutes and internees, each capable of taking twelve children, four women and two men patients.
(e) Temporary matsheds were built with Government funds in the garden of the Kwong Wah (Chinese) Hospital to take the place of marquees borrowed from the Military Authorities to house some two hundred patients overflowing from the wards.
(f) Government purchased for the sum of $50,000 from the Tung Wah directorate, a dilapidated building built at the beginning of the present century as a smallpox hospital but used for some time past as a leper settlement. This enabled Government to take over complete control of the settlement at the beginning of 1939 and greatly facilitated its management by the Medical Department.
(g) A start was made on the construction of decontamination centres at the Queen Mary and Kowloon Hospitals as a precautionary measure against the possibility of local hostilities and gas warfare.
(h) Mention might be made here appropriately to the medical defence scheme for the Colony designed to bring into being at the shortest possible notice arrangements for the collection, transport and treatment of casualties from high explosive, incendiary or gas bombs if the Colony became involved in hostilities.
To this end, plans were drawn up for the conversion of existing Grade A hospitals into casualty clearing hospitals and for utilizing the University buildings, large hostels and other places as relief hospitals, schools and similar institutions being earmarked for use as first aid posts. The recruiting and training of personnel for the various tasks and the provision of reserve stores of ambulances, stretchers, instruments, drugs, dressings, oxygen, and so on, went, of course, hand in hand with these arrangements.
(i) An agreement was reached with the Trustees of the War Memorial Nursing Home for the admission of Government officials under the "panel" system to be introduced at the beginning of January, 1940.