Hospital statistics and hospital plans / by Florence Nightingale.

  • Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910.
Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hospital statistics and hospital plans / by Florence Nightingale. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    3/18
    AND HOSPITAL PLANS. In my paper on the Sanitary Condition of Hospitals, (read before the meeting of this Association at Liverpool, in 1858,) the defective state of hospital statistics was pointed out, as well as the necessity for all hospitals coming to a common agreement on the number and nature of the data to be tabulated for future use. It then occurred to me that the best thing to do to forward the object would be to prepare a set of forms to give effect to these suggestions, and to bring them for discussion before the International Statistical Congress in London last year, the subject being one of interest for all hospitals, foreign and British. To do this, it was necessary to adopt a common nomenclature of diseases, as the foundation. Such a nomenclature had been already adopted at a previous meeting of the Congress at Paris ; and was used in substance in the forms I laid before the London meeting. It was most important to arrive at some common agreement as to classification of diseases, in order to give the requisite facilities for reducing the statistical data and obtaining the results. This matter is confessedly beset with difficulties, not likely to be soon solved. But, as it would never do to leave hospital statistics in the unsatis¬ factory state they were found in, till everybody had agreed on a classification, that one in use by the Registrar-General of England (and now by a large section of the United States) was adopted. The paper and forms which I now lay before the Association are those which, after a lengthened discussion, were adopted by the Statistical Congress. I thought it right to bring them before the Dublin meeting, because of an implied engagement to follow up improvements I had myself urged on the Liverpool meeting of the Association, as above said; and also because I have been given to understand that several eminent hospital medical authorities in Dublin (in that spirit of improvement which distinguishes medical