Cottage hospital

Passmore Edwards Cottage Hospital in Acton, London. Built c. 1900, it was funded by John Passmore Edwards.

A cottage hospital is a mostly obsolete type of small hospital, most commonly found in the United Kingdom.

A cottage hospital in Ruyigi, Burundi
House of Mercy (Pittsfield, Massachusetts), first cottage hospital in the U.S.

The original concept was a small rural building having several beds.[1] The advantages of such a hospital in villages were the provision of care which avoided long journeys to county or voluntary hospitals, facilities to deal more immediately with emergencies, and familiarity the local physician might have with their patients that may affect their treatment.[1] This local knowledge of the patient would probably have been lost had they been referred to their nearest county hospital, as was typical for poorer patients.

Some of these buildings continued to be known as cottage hospitals until recent times. In particular, several are still recognisable in Scotland within the infrastructure of NHS Grampian, Kirkcudbrightshire, Dumfries & Galloway,[2] and in Norfolk and Suffolk in England, an example being the Aldeburgh Cottage Hospital, which is still working as a traditional cottage hospital. The term community hospital is now applied to most of these buildings where they are used to deliver healthcare, reflecting the wider range of services that are provided in more modern times.[3]

  1. ^ a b The Cottage Hospitals 1859–1990, Dr. Meyrick Emrys-Roberts, Tern Publications, Motcombe, Dorset. 1991, ISBN 0-9517136-0-4
  2. ^ "Dumfries and Galloway Hospitals". Dumfries and Galloway Health Board. Archived from the original on 26 February 2020. Retrieved 12 May 2014.
  3. ^ "Community Hospital toolkit" (PDF). Royal College of Nursing. March 2007. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-05-13. Retrieved 2014-05-12.