Help about the hospital records

Date of Admission : Date of Discharge : Admitted By : Recommending Subscriber : Length of Stay : Case Notes

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.

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

This field is searchable in the same way as Date of Admission.

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. Sometimes the Register only indicates the office of the admitting doctor, and these are usually referred to by the following abbreviations:

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

Recommending Subscriber

Not searchable.  A patient’s sponsor (referred to as a subscriber or governor) 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 When the information was recorded it can be viewed in the Admission Record Display and downloadable results table, as entered in the Register.

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.

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