Academic literature on the topic 'Catholic hospitals – Finance'

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to establish the importance of accounting in the management of Spanish military hospitals by the St John’s Order (SJO) of the Roman Catholic Church in the eighteenth century, a time of crisis between the Church and the State. The sacred mission of the Order required that they had a significant role outside the Roman Catholic Church in the care and treatment of the sick and infirm which required them to establish hospitals throughout Spain and across the lands that it had conquered. The study establishes that accounting played a key role in ensuring the success of the unconventional commercial relationship between the SJO and the government and the military. Design/methodology/approach – Niebuhr’s typology is used to help understand how accounting practices were consistent, indeed essential, expectations of the sacred mission of the SJO and not something which represented a denial of the Order’s religious beliefs. The paper relies primarily on documents and other material located in Spanish archives. Findings – The SJO accepted that secular accounting and accountability processes were relevant to their search for God’s love and to showing this love to others. The need for the Order to be accountable to the State was not regarded as profane and antithetical to their religious beliefs. Adopting Niebuhr’s typology of religion and society, this study concludes that the Order was an extraordinary example of Christ the transformer of the culture. Originality/value – This study recognises the need to deepen the understanding of the way in which accounting practices have often played a critical role in the activities of religious organisations by examining an extraordinary example of one organisation which was engaged in an unusual, ongoing, highly complex commercial relationship with the Spanish State.

In the interwar period of the twentieth century, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Canada tried to expand its influence on the public life in the diaspora. To accomplish this task, it enlisted the support of the conservative Canadian Sitch association (reorganized into the United hetman organization in 1934). In its turn, it helped the Sitch in every possible way and provided the permission for the legal functioning of their organization from the Canadian authorities. The monarchists published the articles about their activities and tasks of the society in the pages of Greek Catholic newspapers, such as "Canadian Ukrainian", "Ukrainian News". However, in the 30s of the twentieth century Greek Catholics and monarchists have broken off their relations. Coming of the new bishop, Vasyl Ladyka, instead of Nikita Budka, who began to distance himself from the society in the 1930s, resulted in the creation of the Greek Catholic own organization, the Ukrainian Catholic brotherhood, in 1932. Now UCB had to defend their views before the public. In the religious sphere, the society spread the Catholic faith in the Ukrainian rite, together with priests created parishes, built churches, supported church institutions, organizations, and so on. In the cultural sphere, it founded and financed Ukrainian schools, evening courses and lectures on Ukrainian studies, held concerts, sports competitions, drama performances, built people`s homes, and so on. In the public field it organized orphanages, shelters, hospitals, summer camps for young people, youth centers and so on. Not so actively, but still the fraternity reacted on the political events in Ukraine and joined the general actions of the national patriotic bloc of the Ukrainian public associations in Canada in support of compatriots. As a result, Greek Catholics became more actively involved in the social and political life of the diaspora on equally with Orthodox and communists.

This year Zemun Hospital - Clinical Hospital Center Zemun celebrates 230th anniversary of continuous work, thus becoming the oldest medical facility in Serbia. The exact date of the hospital founding has been often questioned in history. Various dates appeared in the literature, but the most frequent one was 25th of February 1784. Until now, the document which confirms this has never been published. This article represents the first official publication of the document which confirms that Zemun Hospital was indeed founded on this date. The first hospitals started emerging in Zemun when the town became a part of the Habsburg Monarchy. The first sanitary facility ever formed was the ?Kontumac? - a quarantine established in 1730. Soon after, two more confessional hospitals were opened. The Serbian (Orthodox) Hospital was founded before 1769, whereas the German (Catholic) Hospital started working in 1758. Both hospitals were financed, amongst others, by the Town Hall - the Magistrate. In order to improve efficiency of these hospitals, a decision was made to merge them into a single City Hospital. It was founded on 25th February 1784, when the General Command ordered the Magistrate of Zemun to merge the financess of all existing hospitals and initiate the construction of a new building. Although financially united, the hospitals continued working in separate buildings over a certain period of time. The final, physical merging of these hospitals was completed in 1795.

In 1944, the Medical Mission Sisters opened the Catholic Maternity Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, primarily to serve patients of Spanish American descent. The Maternity Institute offered nurse-midwifery care and functioned as a school to train nurse-midwifery students. Originally planned as a home birth service, the Catholic Maternity Institute soon evolved into a service in which patients chose whether to deliver in their own homes or in a small freestanding building called La Casita. In fact, despite their idealism about home birth and strong feelings that home birth was best, the sisters experienced significant ambivalence concerning La Casita. Births there met many of the institute’s pragmatic needs for a larger number of student experiences, quick and safe transfers to a nearby hospital, and more efficient use of the midwives’ time. Importantly, as the sisters realized that many of their patients preferred to deliver at La Casita, they came to see that this option permitted these impoverished patients an opportunity to exercise some choice. However, the choice of many patients to deliver at La Casita—which was significantly more expensive for the Maternity Institute than home birth—eventually led to the demise of the Maternity Institute.

Severin Klosowski was born on the morning of 14 December 1865 in the village of Nagornak near Kolo in part of Russian-occupied Poland. He died 38 years later, as George Chapman, on the morning of 7 April 1903 in London, hanged for poisoning three of his partners with antimony in a way that was long and painful but which made it appear they were dying of natural causes. What is rather unusual about these murders were the many witnesses to the way that he carried them out. Antonio Klosowski was 30 and his wife Emilie 29 when their son Severin was born. They were Roman Catholics, and Antonio was the village carpenter. When he was seven years old, on 17 October 1873, Severin started primary school, which he attended for the next seven years, leaving on 13 June 1880, with a good final report. Later that year, on 1 December, he was apprenticed to Moshko Rappaport, in Zwolen, 90 km south of Warsaw. Rappaport would train him to be a feldscher, an occupation combining the roles of barber and minor surgeon. This qualification would allow him to perform small operations by himself, or to assist major surgery carried out by a fully qualified surgeon. In the summer of 1885, when he was 19, Severin left Zwolen and, armed with a good reference from both his employer and a local doctor, he set off for Warsaw with the idea of becoming a fully qualified surgeon. To finance himself through his studies he took a job as an assistant to a barber-surgeon in the suburb of Praga, and that October he enrolled for a three-month course in practical surgery at the Hospital of Infant Jesus nearby. In January 1886 Severin took a job as an assistant surgeon to a D. Moshkovski and continued working thus until 15 November that year. The following month he came of age: that allowed him to apply for a passport and he was also allowed to sit the entrance examination for the degree of Junior Surgeon at the Imperial University.