A BIDMC Timeline
1896 - The 15-bed New England Deaconess Hospital was opened by Methodist deaconesses as part of their missionary charter.
1902 –Mount Sinai, the first Jewish hospital, was opened in Boston’s West End. The West End, Boston’s “Jewish ghetto”, was home to many poor Jewish immigrants and the hospital attempted to meet the needs of this population.
1912 – The Social Service Department at Mount Sinai opens.
1916 – Mount Sinai dissolved amid internal political struggles and a host of administrative problems.
1917 – A new Jewish community hospital, Beth Israel, opened in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood. Its founding mission was to provide culturally sensitive care to Jewish patients who faced discrimination at many other hospitals, while serving patients from every religion, ethnicity and level of income.
1918 – Planning began for Beth Israel Hospital’s social service department.
1920 – Social work at Beth Israel formally began, becoming one of eighteen Boston hospitals with such departments.
1928 – Beth Israel moved to its present site on Brookline Avenue and was affiliated with the medical schools at Harvard and Tufts.
1928 – Ethel Cohen assumed the directorship of the newly enlarged Social Service Department. Cohen, like Ida Cannon at Mass General Hospital, pioneered the field of medical social work which reflected the Progressive Era’s conviction that effective medical practice must consider adverse environmental conditions that contributed to disease and try to remedy them.
1949 – Ethel Cohen completed her 21-year directorship of the Social Service Department at Beth Israel. In her time at Beth Israel Cohen instituted curricular innovations that ensured that social service was provided on all hospital wards, encouraged a focus on the social context of patients’ illnesses, and provided a model of ethnic-sensitive hospital social service.
1956 – Beatrice Phillips Sachs was appointed Director of the Social Work Department at Beth Israel. A firm believer in comprehensive patient care, Sachs worked to develop social work interventions, including patient care rounds, crisis intervention techniques, individual and group programs, and the hospital's home care program.
1960’s – New community outreach programs are started by Beth Israel in Roxbury and Dorchester.
1996 – Merger of the New England Deaconess Hospital and Beth Israel Hospital
1999 – Organizational redesign and model change that moved discharge planning from social workers to nurse case managers. Social workers work collaboratively with RN case management colleagues and focus on the psychosocial issues that effect care and adaptation to illness.
2008 – The Social Work Department’s Center for Violence Prevention and Recovery’s 10th anniversary, and more than 33 years of achievements as an institution in preventing violence and helping those who are touched by it.
