What information does the database hold?
The main categories of data 1: the basic information
The main categories of data 2: provision and utilisation
The main categories of data 3: income
The main categories of data 4: expenditure
Linking to the Hospital Records Database
About the Hospital Records Database
The quality of the print material meant that we were unable to scan data from the early yearbooks and had to enter the statistics manually. This made it impractical to cover every year, and we therefore took the census years (ie. 1891, 1901 and so on) and midpoint between census years (ie. 1896, 1906 and so on). The idea behind prioritising the census years was to facilitate the use of other socio-economic data in the analysis of the hospitals. For example, users may wish to calculate bed to population ratios in a given place by referring to the census population. As noted above, for a small number of large hospitals we also added data from 1863. We then added data from some intervening years for the larger hospitals whose experience was tabulated.
The quality of the later Hospitals Yearbook was such that we were able to use optical character recognition software to scan in the data. This allowed us to add a full series of data for the 1930s up till 1942. A systematic series did not continue during wartime and we were unable to continue up until 1948.
The data were scanned into spreadsheets, and routines were then developed to match these spreadsheets with information contained in the database (e.g. matching on hospital names) and read data in the spreadsheets into the appropriate parts of our database. Fuller details of this process are available in the article cited above, article published in History and Computing (1999).
The main categories of data 1: the basic information
A search of the database will produce some basic ‘hospital details’, including the name, address and foundation date, as well as the county and town in which the hospital was located. Note that we have used the administrative counties and the county boroughs (burghs in Scotland) that were current in local government organisation between the 1890s and 1940s, NOT the present day administrative areas. It should also be noted that it was not uncommon for hospitals to change their names over time and we have not attempted to record all such changes.
We have endeavoured to produce accurate co-ordinates for each hospital’s location, and these have been used for the mapping function in this website. We used different strategies to arrive at the grid references: Where hospitals have survived to the present day, software is available for converting postcodes to grid references. However, many institutions have been closed or renamed. In some cases, grid references were obtained from a PhD thesis by Les Mayhew, covering London and the surrounding area (Mayhew,L., The theory and practice of urban hospital location, PhD thesis, University of London, 1979). For the rest of the country grid references were obtained directly by John Mohan from old ordnance survey maps held in the British Library map collection.
For a small number of years we recorded the type of hospital (it should be noted that we also describe hospitals with medical schools as ‘general’ in this exercise, to indicate the area of medicine practised). We also occasionally recorded the terms of admission, principally to show which hospitals still retained the system of admission by letter from a subscriber. Multiple terms of admission were possible – free admission could coexist with admission as a paying patient for example.
The main categories of data 2: provision and utilisation
Data on provision and utilisation include at a minimum the numbers of beds, new in- and out-patients, and for the larger hospitals, average bed occupancy and length of stay, and comparative costs of in- and out-patients. For a limited number of years we have also recorded numbers of staff, broken down into medical staff, medical residents, nurses and nurse probationers.
The main categories of data 3: income
The total annual income is recorded for all hospitals, but considerably more data are available for large institutions. Income sources for these are broken down into the different forms of philanthropy, such as subscriptions, donations, legacies and church collections, and the different forms of mass contribution, whether through the Saturday and Sunday funds or the worker’s schemes. Other key categories are revenue from invested capital or property, public contributions from local government, direct payment for services, and earnings from private nursing provision. Burdett’s Hospitals and Charities provide sub-totals for ‘ordinary’ income (ie exclusive of unexpected legacies and large donations) and ‘extraordinary’ income (ie. unexpected legacies and large donations) and we have recorded these. These two sums should be added to arrive at the hospital’s total income. Otherwise the category ‘Total income on the maintenance account’ indicates the hospitals income in a given year (distinguishing its maintenance account for running costs, from its capital account). Finally, bearing in mind the difference noted above for the London hospitals from the 1920s, users should note that the sum of ‘Grants from London charitable funds’ and ‘Grants from London hospital funds’ should equate to the total recorded under ‘Voluntary gifts’.
The main categories of data 4: expenditure
For the smaller hospitals an expenditure total is given, but for larger institutions there is a breakdown by category. This divides spending into key areas, such as salaries, provisions, building maintenance, surgical and dispensing costs, pensions, management, rents and rates and so on. In some years these figures are broken down to differentiate spending on in- and out-patients, an innovation introduced to permit comparison of departmental costs. There are several variants on headline expenditure figures – ‘total maintenance expenditure’ refers to expenditure on the running costs of the institution; ‘extraordinary expenditure’ refers to one-off payments (often in the form of contributions to capital works, or purchase of equipment); while ‘total expenditure’ aggregates together maintenance and extraordinary expenditures
Linking to the Hospital Records Database
We have also provided a link to the other major historical hospital database, the Hospital Records Database, a joint project of the Wellcome Library and The National Archives. By following this link you can learn more about what happened to your hospital under the NHS. You can also discover what documentary records of the institution survive, and where they are located. Users should note that some of our hospitals could not be linked to this database, which does not include Ireland, and which also omits other, mostly small institutions, which appear in the yearbooks.
About the Hospital Records Database
The Hospital Records Database provides information on the existence and location of the records of UK hospitals. The information contained in the Hospital Records Database was obtained from questionnaires completed by local authority record offices, supplemented by further research. There are currently over 2,800 entries, which have been compiled by the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. The database provides information including administrative details of the hospitals, their status or type, the location and covering dates of administrative and clinical records and the existence of lists, catalogues or other finding aids and links to some online hospital catalogues on Access to Archives. A small number of hospitals which maintain their own archives are included, but coverage of records still held by hospitals is limited. Enquiries about the records of specific hospitals listed on the database should be directed to the relevant repository directly.
Readers may find occasional discrepancies between data in the Hospital Records database and the Voluntary Hospitals database, for example on foundation dates of hospitals. This is because we drew our information from different sources, in our case relying on the yearbooks.
