Push-Button Hospital

Mrs. Lois Harris, 22, leaned back luxuriously in her bed, which can be raised or lowered for comfort simply by pressing a button, and declared: "This is really living. Modern homes have nothing on this." Her roommate, Mrs. Helen Sigmund, 26, agreed. Tired for the moment of looking through the plate-glass sliding doors at the shrub-covered hillside above Los Angeles' famed Sunset Boulevard, she simply reached up and pulled a switch. Automatically, yellow cloth curtains rippled across, closing in the room. Said Mrs. Sigmund: "We'll be spoiled rotten by the time they take us home."

The setting for this sybaritic living was no luxury hotel, though it looked like one from the outside. It was the new Kaiser Foundation Hospital, opened last week for the 95,000 area subscribers to Henry J. Kaiser's prepaid medical and hospitalcare plan. To shy, freckled Dr. Sidney Garfield, head of the eleven-hospital Kaiser chain, the ultra-modern Los Angeles unit comes near to fulfilling a 20-year dream: the perfect hospital from the point of view of patients, visitors, nurses and doctors.

Breakfast at 8:30. Instead of a single central corridor for patients and visitors, corpses and dinner wagons, there are three corridors. The central one is used by doctors, nurses and patients. Balconies on each side of the building serve as corridors for visitors, who thus cannot get in the way or see what they should not see. At intervals along the work corridor are stations for nurses, who serve only four rooms each, thus saving countless steps and precious time. Surgeon Garfield has arranged the four operating rooms in a cloverleaf pattern around a central instrument room. The hospital's five lower floors are for regular medical, surgical and obstetrical cases, the two top floors for convalescent patients, who can lounge and walk around at will. They enjoy this extra freedom, and can be waited on by maids, thus saving nurses' time.

To Mrs. Harris and Mrs. Sigmund, maternity patients on the second floor, one of the hospital's best features is that patients are not rudely waked at dawn to have breakfast forced upon them. Breakfast comes at 8:30, after a natural awakening and a leisurely toilette.

Babies in the Drawer. Another boon is the modified "rooming-in" for babies. Alongside the head of each mother's bed is a drawer-like arrangement with a plate-glass front. Last week, Mrs. Harris reached over, pulled out the drawer, and there in a bassinet snuggled Cynthia, three days old. When she had finished cooing at the baby, Mrs. Harris pushed the drawer back, and Cynthia was again in the semiprivate nursery which she shared with Mrs. Sigmund's baby. When Mrs. Harris closed the drawer, a light flashed on in the central corridor, showing the nurse on duty that Cynthia was once again in her charge.

For all its gadgets, the Kaiser hospital cost no more than the current big-city average: $3,000,000 for 210 beds in private and semiprivate rooms. Its charges for those who are not members of the Kaiser plan are not out of line--$15 a day in a double room and $22 in a single, and members seldom pay more than their monthly dues. But to the patients the money means less than the atmosphere. Said Mrs. Sigmund: "It's really nice to be in a hospital that's so pleasant instead of like a jail."

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