Lord Memorial Prize Essay

. Although it may well be unreliable and illogical, is a well-known habit to form firm, lasting, and definite first impressions. That they are often ^accurate and always superficial is to be admitted, but nevertheless they frequently form the basis of our later estimations and prejudice our views for good or evil, the more so when the situation is a new one to us, or one whose arrival we have been dreading. Those first few hours of contact are often the most important of all, and never is the Patient more prone to form a judgment than in her first few hours in the new and, to her, worrying atmosphere, of a hospital. Since, too, it is the nurse who has the first and, in many ways, the most Ultimate contact with the patient, she can well make or mar the patient's outlook; she can, in those first few hours, settle for good or bad the patient's degree of co-operation, her contentment of mind and with these her v^iole attitude towards treatment, which, ln psychiatric cases most of all, may mean a big Point in the outlook for recovery. If the nurse can gain fully the patient's confidence and make her feel that a wise decision has been made in her c9ming to hospital, she will have made a great and Vltal step towards both the patient's peace of mind, and her response to later handling. If she fails, she may soon have to deal with that most difficult of problems, the unco-operative patient. Despite the great advances that have been made, there are still unfortunately many who think of Mental Hospitals in terms of the old asylum days, as a place where one is kept locked up in cells and cruelly used. It is fortunately much less common to hear this viewpoint nowadays, but it is still heard, and the nurse's duty thus starts long before the Patient's admission, in that she should always try to show in her personality and in her ordinary round ?f life that a Mental Hospital is a Hospital, and that she is a nurse just as is her colleague in a General hospital, and not just some sort of wardress. Some of the new patient's first impressions will, ?f course, be of the hospital building itself and of |he room where she is first received, and most of these are beyond the nurse's control. The nurse, however, will no doubt be called upon to go down t? the hospital entrance hall to receive her patient, and the impression of this first contact is very lrnportant. There is often an atmosphere which suggests that the patient is being " handed over as one might transfer some article, and this is increased if there is too obvious a show made of the ^gal documents which the relative or Relieving Officer has brought. In the case of Voluntary Patients, who, thanks to Nerve Clinics and more