GENERAL HELP

About the Hospitals

The Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street was the first hospital dedicated to inpatient care of sick children in the UK. It opened in 1852 after a successful campaign to raise funds by its founder, Dr Charles West. The early hospital was housed in a converted 18^th century gentlemen’s residence in Great Ormond Street, Holborn, an area on the northern edge of the West End, adjacent to Bloomsbury. The modern hospital occupies the same site although it has grown to enormously, compared to its original 10 bed institution. Its founding aim was to provide care for the sick children of the poor. The admission registers for Great Ormond Street are held at the hospital’s Museum and Archive, managed by Mr Nicholas Baldwin. The registers are catalogued: GOS/9/1-20.

Cromwell House was Great Ormond Street’s convalescent home, situated in leafy, semi-rural Highgate on the northern edges of the city. It was opened in 1869 to take children from the main hospital considered to be no longer in need of acute medical care. The Home provided children with a place where they could recover their strength, after sometimes months of gruelling hospital treatment, before being returned to the rigours of their natural habitats. The admission registers for Cromwell House are held at the hospital’s Museum and Archive, managed by Mr Nicholas Baldwin. The registers are catalogued: CH/9/1,3,4,6.

The Evelina Hospital opened in 1869 in a purpose-built building. It was sited on the newly constructed Southwark Bridge Road, just south of the Thames in a neighbourhood of wretched poverty and noxious industries. The hospital was the brainchild of Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, created in memory of his wife Evelina who had died in childbirth. It too had as its key objective the provision of care for the sick children of its impoverished neighbours. The records for the Evelina are held at the London Metropolitan Archives. The registers are catalogued: H09/EV/B01-2.

The Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease opened in 1867 in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, just round the corner from the Hospital for Sick Children. This was no coincidence as two of its founders were nurses at the children’s hospital. Catherine Wood and Miss Spencer Percival were concerned for the welfare of children with chronic joint disease, who were being discharged from Great Ormond Street, only partially recovered. Such children inevitably were suffering from tubercular infection of the joints and needed prolonged gentle care, sometimes lasting years. Despite initial objections to such a specialist hospital it was tremendously successful, and the demand for beds consistently outpaced the hospital’s ability to accommodate it. The records for the Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease are held at the Museum and Archives at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The registers are catalogued SBHA/MR1 (applications register); SBHA/MR2 (admissions register)

The Royal Hospital for Sick Children Glasgow opened in 1883, and was one of the last of the major children’s hospitals to be opened during the 19th century. The idea for a children's hospital had been mooted more than 20 years earlier, in 1861, at a meeting attended by a group of medical men, clergymen and influential citizens. They were galvanized by the shockingly high infant mortality rate in Glasgow; and the emergence of children's hospitals in major cities across England and Scotland, particularly in Edinburgh the previous year. However, there was major opposition to the plan, not least from Glasgow Royal Infirmary, which objected on the grounds that it provided beds for children, and that specialist institutions were not needed. The Hospital's founders eventually prevailed and a suitable building, a residential property, was acquired in Garnethill, at the corner of Scott Street and Buccleuch Street. It received its first patient on 8 January 1883. There were two medical and one surgical ward, which provided 58 beds for children aged 2 to 12. The records for the hospital are held by the Greater Glasgow Health Board Archive (http://www.archives.gla.ac.uk/gghb/collects/default.html). The main records used for this database were the admission registers 1883-1904 in the series YH6/1/1-26.

About the Databases

The HHARP databases contain records transcribed from Victorian and Edwardian patient admission registers for four London children hospitals: the Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street (and its convalescent home, Cromwell House), the Evelina Hospital and the Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease. Searches can be made by individual institution or across the collection of databases.

Each database record provides information on an individual admission to one of the institutions. There are 104,000 records relating to admissions to Great Ormond Street, 10,290 relating to admissions to Cromwell House, 11,185 relating to Evelina admissions, 2,488 admissions to the Alexandra Hospital, and 11,921 relating to the Glasgow hospital.

Registers for all institutions provided the same basic information:

1. Child’s name, sex and age on admission
2. Date of admission, name of the admitting doctor, the ward to which he or she was admitted and date of discharge
3. Initial diagnosis, discharge date and outcome of stay in hospital
4. Remarks on aspects of the child’s stay in hospital

The records for each hospital also included some additional information:

Great Ormond Street Hospital : child’s address on admission; details of referrals on discharge; a small number of records (1,339) have patients’ case notes attached

Cromwell House : address on admission; details of referrals on discharge; information on the child’s vaccination status and a history of childhood diseases encountered (for a small number of records).

Evelina Hospital : address on admission; parental occupation; brief details of treatment given; details of referrals on discharge; duration of illness before admission; brief details of post mortem findings (where result was death in the Hospital).

Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease : the records in this database are derived from two sources, an applications register and an admissions register. The applications register provides information on the date of application, parental occupations and child’s home address and an indication of whether the application for admission was successful or not. The admissions register contains several unique pieces of information: name of referring institution (many of the patients had been sent from other hospitals), cause of the problem in the joint, condition of the joint on admission, indication of which limb/joint was affected (left or right), duration of condition before admission and whether any fees were paid.

Royal Hospital for Children, Glasgow: child’s address on admission, address of recommender, child’s religion and the name and occupation of parents.

Not all these additional elements were recorded for each child.

User Registration

Both registered and unregistered users can use the HHARP web site and database. However, several advantages are gained by becoming a registered user:

• Access to more advanced search options
• Access to more detailed records of individual admissions
• Ability to print and download records.

Registration enables us to analyse the types of user on the system, helping us to plan enhancements and future developments more effectively. Registration also helps to deter inappropriate use of the database, thus protecting free access to this unique source for bona fide researchers. The registration process is simple, FREE, and requires that you provide minimal personal information.

Your details will never be passed on to third parties and will only be used in the administration of this web site.

Searching

The Search Form is split into four distinct areas (Personal Details, Residence, Admission and Stay, and Disease, Outcome and Discharge) grouping related pieces of information together. Each area has its own Help. Searches can combine elements from within and between these areas, although it is advisable not to attempt to combine too many elements in a search. It is always advisable to start a search broad and narrow down to reduce the number of hits.

Use the Clear Form button before starting a completely new search, otherwise search terms left over from a previous search will affect the results.

Once all the search terms have been entered simply click on Search (at the top or bottom of the form) to begin the search.

For more information on searching specific fields see the related HELP topic.

Results

The results of your search are displayed in a table which provides brief information extracted from each record.

You can sort the results table by any of the columns, by clicking on the down arrow in the Sort By box and clicking on the desired sort format.

If the results were not what you were expecting you can click on ‘Amend Your Search Criteria’, which takes you back to the Search Form.

Note: Users are limited as to the number of records which can be viewed. A message will alert you if your results set exceeds this limit.

To view a full record click anywhere on the line relating to that record in the results table. The Full Record Display page displays all the information relating to that record in the same arrangement as in the Search Form. For Great Ormond Street, Cromwell House, the Evelina and the Admissions to Alexandra Hip Hospital an additional section, Patient History, includes information such as ‘Cause of Condition’, Duration of illness, history of infantile diseases, among others, depending on the type of record being viewed.

The structure of the application records display page for the Alexandra Hip Hospital reflects the different content of this register. There are no admission, disease or patient history sections, but instead each records contains an ‘Application’ section, which provides details of the application to be admitted, including whether it was successful or not, date of admission if successful, name of the child’s sponsor (or subscriber) and other remarks.

The content of the record display page is driven by the type of record selected, so if a field is not present in a particular database it will not be displayed when viewing records from that institution. For instance you will only find the treatment field in the display page for Evelina records. However, if the field is present in a database, but was the data was not entered for a particular record, the field will be reproduced in the display page, but will carry the comment ‘Not recorded’.

To view another record in your results set, click on the link ‘Back to search results’ and select another record to view, or use the previous and next buttons in the record display page to view adjacent records.

If the record has any related admissions you can use the Related Records links at the bottom of the page to navigate between them.

Printing and Downloading

Both the Results Table and individual records can be printed by clicking on the Print button on the appropriate screen.

There is also a download facility available on the Results Table page. This facility allows users to download the full results set into a tabular csv file (comma separated values) which can then be opened in most spreadsheet applications. There are two options for download. Which you use depends on what you searched for. I you searched for an individual institution eg Alexandra Hip Hospital use the ‘Results for AHH’ link to download your results table. If you searched for one of the other hospitals, use the ‘Download All Results except AHH’ link. If your search was across all institutions you will need to download them in two steps, using first one link and then the other. The reason for this is that Alexandra Hip Hospital records are so different in composition to those from the other hospitals that to include these in a standard format would result in a very large number of blank fields.

If, when using Excel, the file opens with all the data in the first column, highlight the first column, click Data from the toolbar and select ‘Text to Column’. Choose ‘Delimited’ and on next screen choose ‘comma’, and follow the remaining instructions to ‘Finish’. The data will be separated into columns representing fields in the database.

For Great Ormond Street, Cromwell House, Glasgow or the Evelina each record (row) in the downloaded table contains the following fields (not always populated):

For the Alexandra Hip Hospital each record (row) in the downloaded table contains the following fields, derived from both the applications and admission registers:

There are limits on the number of records which can be printed or downloaded. This limit is set automatically at 200 records for any one search. If users have valid reasons for requiring larger volumes of data they should contact the project, using the ‘Contact Us’ link, stating your search parameters, the purpose for which the data is required and a decision will be made within 28 days.

Library

The Library contains a collection of short articles describing various aspects of the hospitals in HHARP including brief histories of the hospitals, short biographies of some of the pioneering doctors who worked in them and of the matrons who organised and managed the wards and the housekeeping arrangements. Articles will continue to be added to the Library over time, so be sure to keep checking for new arrivals.

Gallery

The Gallery contains a collection of images of the hospitals from the earliest times through to the Edwardian era. They show views of the interior and exterior of hospital buildings, and images of the people who inhabited them, including the patients, nurses and doctors.