Hospital Housekeeping by Charlotte A. Aikens

[Sidenote: The Hospital Housekeeper]

Hospital housekeeping is intensely practical business. If it is to be successfully and satisfactorily conducted, it demands that the housekeeper be a woman of no inferior or uncertain attainments. All the elements that make for success in home housekeeping, and many more, are needed in a hospital. There must be breadth of vision, the qualities of an organizer, the ability to deal with large problems, a keen sense of justice, and the executive force needed to manage, without fear, fuss or favor, the various classes of people that touch the housekeeper's realm. Many a man who is a success in managing a village store would utterly fail when placed in charge of even one section of a great department store. And the same may be said of the average woman in hospital housekeeping. Apart from the special knowledge of the business, that comes only by diligent study, accurate observation and experience-never by accident-the housekeeper needs special qualities of mind and heart. Indeed, special qualifications are needed by every one whose life work is to be wrought out in an institution. A hospital or any institution that has to deal with infirm, aged or unfortunate members of society, is no place for a person of strong racial antipathies. It is no place for the tale-bearer or the gossip, nor for the person who has a grudge against fate and feels she has never received justice. It is no place for the person who is discouraged, or who assumes the air of a martyr, and leads a crushed life, bemoaning the fact that her highest motives and best efforts are never appreciated. Those who would live happily in an institution must be prepared to be misunderstood, and fortified against discouragement from that source.