The Folkestone Beds

Osler and the Canadians in Folkestone.

28 June 1914 was a glorious summer day in Folkestone. The Leas, perhaps the most beautiful promenade in England, overlooked the twinkling blue English Channel, and out of a cloudless sky the sun blazed down on the well-to-do as they strolled between the Hotel Metropole and the Grand Hotel. The Boer War was but a memory. King George V sat on the throne, albeit the architecture of the town was mo...

Flow through Packed Beds and Fluidized Beds

Chemical engineering operations commonly involve the use of packed and fluidized beds. These are devices in which a large surface area for contact between a liquid and a gas (absorption, distillation) or a solid and a gas or liquid (adsorption, catalysis) is obtained for achieving rapid mass and heat transfer, and particularly in the case of fluidized beds, catalytic chemical reactions. You wil...

The Safety of Hospital Beds

Who needs beds?

We wish to respond to two recent articles highlighting a decline in the frequency of bedside teaching and advocating a return to this traditional clinical education set piece [1, 2] We agree with the assertion that bedside teaching has, in the past, proved to be an important form of clinical education through which learners gain professional, communication, physical examination and reasoning sk...

How many hospital beds?

For many years, average bed occupancy level has been the primary measure that has guided hospital bed capacity decisions at both policy and managerial levels. Even now, the common wisdom that there is an excess of beds nationally has been based on a federal target of 85% occupancy that was developed about 25 years ago. This paper examines data from New York state and uses queueing analysis to e...