Laptops in Hospital – 2
I put a post on this earlier and today as I travelled to try to see the eclipse, I got talking to a lady who happened to be a hospital physio working with stroke patients. I asked her whether they allowed patients to have laptops and she said they did to a certain extent. But they were always worried that they’d get stolen.
The latter may be true, but if hospitals have a crime problem, it should not be allowed to get in the way of patients’ care and well-being, Iit should also be properly solved.
I also think that most patients would also accept having the coputer in hospital at their own risk. I certainly would and would make sure it was a rather elderly but reliable machine.
The Anonymous Widower 
In a place which is full of members of the public who are free to wander in and out without having to account for why they are there, theft will always be a problem. However, the one very interesting thing I found was that the hospital library service almost never lost books. Patients would leave books with ward staff when they went home, or on some occasions, take them into a library once they got home so that they would be returned. We never did work out why that was.
We had a largish number of pagers for use by patients and families – patients whose chemo needed to be prepared on site after they had seen the doctor were given a pager so they could be told when their drug was ready – this meant they didnt have to sit in chemo for perhaps 3 or 4 hours. Even though the patients didnt know the bleep number, they were marked as hospital property etc, they went missing often. Also relatives of very poorly patients were given them to encourage them to go get some food or take a walk, knowing they could be contacted quickly. They went missing too. Things were stolen from the hospital shop, from wards etc. But never library books.
Comment by liz | January 4, 2011 |
Another side to books is that the manager of the local Oxfam shop says that books are one of his best fund raisers.
Comment by AnonW | January 4, 2011 |
There are lots and lots of people who go to Oxfam or similar, buy half a dozen books, read them as they would library books, the return them to Oxfam as a donation when they go in for the next half dozen.
A huge percentage of clothing donated to Oxfam etc is thrown out as rags. And quite a lot of bric-a-brac.
Comment by liz | January 4, 2011 |