A New Kind of Hospital

The physical plant of the Hopkins Children's Center (see above) is as different from that of an ordinary hospital as Dr. Robert E. Cooke and other inventive pediatricians could make it. Not surprisingly, it boasts almost as much space for researchers' laboratories as for its 270 children's beds and medical and nursing services. But the hospital is built on the premise that a sick child is not simply a small replica of a sick adult.

Permissive Faces. When an adult is sick, the Hopkins pediatricians hold, he wants to suffer in privacy. Not the child: his medical progress may be hindered by the strange and awesome structure and atmosphere of the ordinary hospital. He wants things to be like home. He wants to see other children, sick or well, and he wants to be seen. So although virtually all the new children's hospital beds are on the two-to-a-room plan, the rooms themselves are divided by glass walls above a three-foot dado. If the kids make faces at each other through the glass, that is fine with today's permissive doctors. For nursing or medical privacy, curtains are drawn to cover the glass.

Every child well enough to get out of bed takes his meals in one of the playrooms that double as dining rooms and classrooms. Unless the doctor orders otherwise, patients may indulge the common childhood taste for hot dogs and hamburgers. They are spared broccoli and beets (rated as "inedibles" by the center's dietitians) and have a wide choice of other vegetables. Hopkins dietitians have learned that children in hospitals do not go for pie, so they offer a choice of ice cream, cake, cookies, puddings and fruit.

Preemie Protection. Mothers of very sick children may sleep in, at $6.50 a night (including breakfast and lunch). For the most helpless of all immature humans, the premature baby, there is a special wing consisting of six rooms, each containing four incubators. As each room is emptied, it is completely sterilized, thus greatly reducing the risk of infection for the next occupants. (With a single, large preemie ward, which can never be emptied, this practice is impossible.) And preemies enjoy an electronic monitoring system which, the Hopkins believes, is the first of its kind in the world. Under each armpit of the preemie an electrode is taped. One records the baby's temperature, the other its heartbeat. Both signals are transmitted to a central nursing station and can be wired to sound an alarm if either measurement gets out of line.

As an overall protection to reduce the risk of infection, the entire pediatric hospital wing is not only comfortably air-conditioned, but is kept under higher pressure than the outside air. In operating rooms and preemie rooms, the air pressure is still higher. Whenever a door is opened, air moves out, and no rush of incoming air can carry germs from personnel to patients.

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