In the newspapers
and magazines of the 1960s/70s, information about children in hospital centred
around hospital success stories; visits of royalty and film stars; Easter
bunnies delivering a surfeit of Easter eggs; and Father Christmas and his
helpers with an abundance of toys and good cheer. The stories conveyed images
of hospitals working near miracles; of everyone caring about children in
hospital and of the kindness shown by hospitals for their child patients. All
of this was true but it hid a very dark underside to the hospitalisation of
children - long term, often devastating, emotional trauma.
In Australia, the
need for change was heralded by the concern expressed in 1970 by the Aust.
& N.Z. College of Psychiatrists. Their Position Statement entitled “The
admission of mothers to hospital with their young children" accused
hospitals of……doing more damage in one year than all the psychiatrists together
could undo in several years. . .
That
hospitalisation could have such devastating effects on young children was well
known to me. In the late 1960's I worked for three years in the children's unit
of a psychiatric hospital handling the most severely emotionally disturbed
children in the State. Hospitalisation at an early age appeared regularly in
the case histories of these children.
One would have
expected the psychiatrists' position statement to bring forth cries for an
immediate enquiry and remedial action. Instead, it was virtually ignored. The
hospitals' case was that parents upset children who were soon settled and
better off without them. A fallacy already forcefully disproved by the
published works, both written and audiovisual, of James and Joyce Robertson http://www.awch.org.au/2-year-old-goes-to-hospital.php .
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| The "cage” cot with a wire frame 1976 |
If the mother (or the child's caring person) was not
admitted, how did hospitals cope? Nurses did their best in an often impossible
situation. For the most part, children simply cried until they became withdrawn
and “settled". Distressed toddlers were particularly difficult to manage.
In their anguish they often tried to climb out of the cot. Fearing that they
would harm themselves they were sometimes put in restrainers. Documented cases
of children choking to death in them discouraged the practice. Another method
was to put a wire frame over the top of the cot thus making it into a cage. In
the 1970's, I saw one of these in a regional hospital in NSW, another one in
Victoria. In each case, the hospitals saw the cage as a perfectly valid
solution that ensured the child's safety, even though there were empty beds at
the side of the cot which could have been used by a parent. Indeed, in Victoria
I was told the cage was used because the child was the only one in the ward so,
instead of having a nurse there just for one patient, the sister in the adult
ward kept popping in. When I asked why they hadn't admitted the child's mother
in these circumstances, I was told it wasn't hospital policy. The nurse
admitted she would willingly have let the mother stay (had it been allowed) as
the toddler was a nuisance disturbing and upsetting her patients all night
Of course, most hospitals did not use restrainers or
cages, but there were still very distressing sights associated with necessary
treatments. I remember seeing a very young child in a side ward with his eyes
swathed in bandages and his wrists tied to the sides of the cot so that he did
not pull off the bandages. He was kept heavily sedated but one couldn't help
wondering what fears or dreams he was having in that twilight state. I felt
sure his mother holding his hand and comforting him would have helped.
Cracking the
system
In the literature,
the problems of hospitalisation of children had been identified and the
solutions outlined. As hospitals failed to implement more humane policies,
there were various attempts by individuals and groups to force action but none
had been successful. Hospital boards were thought to be omnipotent. To
challenge them from inside the hospital was to invite personal disaster
career-wise; to challenge from the outside was to invite ridicule as a
trouble-maker.
At the first
meeting of the group which subsequently became AWCH I voiced my strongly held
convictions:
- that infants and young children needed their mothers in hospital and that need had to be met
- that parents and professionals must work together publicly if the above aim was to be achieved
I believed that we could do better by drawing
upon Australia's egalitarian ethos and creating a platform from which all could
speak on behalf of the children, free of professional, personal or vested
interests.
Thus AWCH was born
in the belief that parents and professionals together could crack the
system' for the good of the children.
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