The hospital, facilities where so insufficient that it was common for both men and women to share the same wards. This was totally forbidden anywhere else in the Workhouse. There was not even a separate ward for the sick children. There was no provision to separate the infectious cases from the other sick inmates. Neither mattresses nor coconut fibre matting covered the wooden beds in the hospital. The thin blankets and threadbare sheets were in such short supply that some patients had to go without. The stone floored rooms were in need of painting and repairing. The sparse rooms had no pictures on the walls and only one chair for the nurse to sit in. The privies were reported to be defective and insufficient and the smell carried around the whole of the hospital.
There was still only one paid nurse and no paid servants to help her. The need for the hospital was so great that by May 1866 the nurse in the workhouse was really busy and the wards were so full other patients were being refused admission. As another three months passed a temporary building needed to be set up to cater for the number of patients suffering from infectious diseases. Unlike other hospitals the workhouse hospital was answerable to the government, so the following year the board of guardians sent all the information regarding the estimated cost for the proposed building for their approval.
© Neil and Janet Croft 2005