Text VII

Hospital, an establishment that provides medical and surgical care ordinarily unavailable in a doctor's office. Early in their history, hospitals (the word derives from the Latin hospes meaning host or guest) were institutions run by monas­teries for the provision of "hospitality" to the poor, to stricken travelers, to lepers, and to the lame and the blind. The secularization of hospitals began in England when Henry VIII closed the monasteries. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, when almshouses be­gan to accommodate the indigent who were permanently disabled or incurably ill, hospitals started to assume some semblance of a curative role.

There are at present over 7000 hospi­tals in the United States. Approximately half this number have fewer than 100 beds and approximately 5000 supposedly conform to the standards of safety, clean-liness, bed facilities, essential equipment, laboratories, nurse-patient ratio, respect for patients' rights, and medical and surgical staff laid down by the Joint Com­mission on the Accreditation of Hospitals. All hospitals of every type are eager for this official approval since it practically guar­antees that they will be reimbursed for Medicare and Medicaid patients without additional government inspection. Prac­tically no hospital (unless entirely supported by rich alcoholics) can continue to operate nowadays without such funds.

Contemporary hospitals may be classi­fied as general or special: those compe­tent to deal with all manner of illnesses both mental and physical or those that concentrate on a specialty such as eye and ear, or joint diseases, or alcoholism, or psychiatric institutes.

Hospitals are also classified according to who owns and operates them. Voluntary hospitals, by far the largest category are run as nonprofit in­stitutions under the auspices of a uni­versity, trade union, religious group, or community philanthropy. Proprietary hospitals are privately owned, usually by the staff doctors who operate them for their own profit. City, county, and state hospitals are financed by local taxes. The complex of ser­vices known as a medical center has be­come an increasingly vital aspect of com­munity health care. The term is usually applied to a group of hospitals connected with a university medical school in or near a big city. In addition to offering the local population emergency facilities as well as in- and outpatient services, such centers maintain a network of re­lationships with social workers, home care nurses, and special neighborhood programs for the aging.

As hospitals keep pace with advances in medical science and technology, they perform different functions, providing in­tensive care facilities, burn treatment cen­ters, highly specialized diagnostic tests (CAT scanning, angiographs, and the like), and radiation therapy based on advances in nuclear medicine. More and more hospitals are becoming affiliated with medical schools. Such affiliations offer patients the best and quickest application of the newest find­ings in diagnosis and treatment because of the constant and prompt evaluation
by the teaching staff.

Every member of the community is entitled to easy access to emergency treatment by qualified pro­fessionals in a well-equipped hospital set­ting when the life of the victim is at stake. And every patient signed into a hospital for a brief or extended stay is entitled to the services of a courteous and competent nursing staff in a clean, safe and uncrowded environment.