Information (before) Technology

When I returned to the staff in October 1969 I became interested in identifying all patients who had undergone pacemaker implantation at the hospital.  Knowing the patient who had undergone the first implant in 1963, it was a simple matter of scanning the cardiothoracic theatre operation register from that date.  There were just twelve such patients.  From there I prospectively entered into notebooks details about all subsequent pacemaker recipients.

By now I was interested also in identifying all patients who had undergone cardiac catheterisation.   This was a much bigger task involving spending a considerable number of hours deep in the dusty Xray Department basement, trawling through procedure day books.  Having identified in excess of 1,000 patient names and dates of procedures, I then called for individual patient records to locate a catheter report.  More notebooks accumulated.  This became a time-consuming process and I never did complete the medical record search for the years 1971-72.   A similar exercise followed for patients who had undergone cardiac surgery.   Some of the graphs published in this history are the direct result of those endeavours.