St Thomas' Hospital

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St Thomas' Hospital
Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust
Saint Thomas’ Hospital, located across the River Thames from the Houses of Parliament
Location
Place Lambeth London, England, (UK)
Organisation
Care System Public NHS
Hospital Type Teaching
Affiliated Med.Sch. King's College London
Services
Emergency Dept. Yes Accident & Emergency
Beds Unknown
Speciality Dermatology
History
Founded circa 1100
Links
Website Guy’s & St Thomas’ Trust Homepage
See also Hospitals in England

St Thomas' Hospital is a large NHS hospital in Lambeth, London. It is administratively a part of Guy’s & St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. It has provided health care freely or under charitable auspices since the 12th century and was originally located in Southwark.

Contents

[edit] History

The hospital was described as ancient in 1215 and was named after Thomas Becket — which suggests it may have been founded after 1173 when Becket was canonised. However, it is possible it was only renamed in 1173 and that it was founded when St Mary Overie Priory was refounded in 1100 in Southwark.

Originally it was run by a mixed order of Augustinian monks and nuns, dedicated to Thomas Becket. It provided shelter and treatment for the poor, sick, and homeless. In the fifteenth century, Richard Whittington endowed a laying-in ward for unmarried mothers. The monastery was dissolved in the Reformation, but reopened in 1551 and rededicated to Thomas the Apostle. It was reopened by Edward VI and has remained open ever since. [1]

At the end of the 17th century, the hospital and church were largely rebuilt by Sir Robert Clayton, president of the hospital and a former Lord Mayor of London. He employed Thomas Cartwright as architect.

Sir Thomas Guy, a governor of St Thomas', founded Guy's Hospital in 1721 as a place to treat 'incurables' discharged from St Thomas'.

The hospital was home for many years to St Thomas' Hospital Medical School. Originally a single medical school sited across St Thomas' and Guy's Hospital, Guy's Hospital established its own separate medical school in 1825 follow a dispute over the successor to the Surgeon Astley Cooper.[2] The medical school subsequently remerged in 1982 with that at Guy's to form the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals. Additions included the Royal Dental Hospital of London School of Dental Surgery joining with Guy's Dental School on 1 August 1983 and St John's Institute of Dermatology on 1 August 1985.[2] Following discussion held between 1990 and 1992 with King's College London and the King's College London Act 1997, the institution merged in 1998 with King's College School of Medicine and Dentistry to form as The Guy's, Kings & Thomas' Schools of Medicine (GKT School of Medicine), of Dentistry and of Biomedical Sciences.[2] This was renamed in 2005 as King's College London School of Medicine and Dentistry at Guy's, King's and St Thomas' Hospitals.

The Nightingale Training School and Home for Nurses opened at St Thomas' Hospital on July 9, 1860.(It is now called the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery and is part of King's College London.)

St Thomas' Hospital is one of London's most famous hospitals - associated with names such as Astley Cooper and William Cheselden and Florence Nightingale, and appearing in the 2002 movie 28 Days Later.

There are only a few surviving pieces of the old Hospital in St Thomas Street in Southwark — including the Old Operating Theatre, which is now a Museum.

The hospital left Southwark in 1862 when the site was compulsorily purchased to make way for construction of the Charing Cross Railway. The hospital was temporarily housed at Royal Surrey Gardens in Kennington until the new Lambeth site was completed in 1871.

[edit] The modern hospital

The modern St Thomas' Hospital is located at a site historically known as Stangate in the London Borough of Lambeth. It is directly across the river Thames from the Palace of Westminster on a plot of land largely reclaimed from the river during construction of the Albert Embankment in the late 1860s.

The new buildings were designed by Henry Currey and the foundation stone was laid by Queen Victoria in 1868. This was one of the first new hospitals to adopt the "pavilion principle" - popularised by Florence Nightingale in her Notes on Hospitals - by having six separate ward buildings at right angles to the river frontage set 125 feet apart and linked by low corridors. The intention was primarily to improve ventilation and to separate and segregate patients with infectious diseases. There was a seventh pavilion at the north end of the site next to Westminster Bridge Road for the "Treasurer's House" (hospital offices) and a nurses home. Between the middle ward pavilions was the entrance hall from Lambeth Palace Road and chapel. The medical school was at the southern end of the site. The formal layout to the Albert Embankment was also designed to complement the Parliamentary buildings opposite.

The hospital was designed to accommodate 588 beds, although the hospital charity's fundraising was not sufficient to open all the wards until 1896

The northern part of the hospital site was severely damaged during World War II destroying three ward blocks. Limited reconstruction began in the 1950s. Complete rebuilding to a more ambitious plan to designs by Yorke Rosenberg and Mardall was agreed on in the 1960s requiring the realignment of Lambeth Palace Road further away from the river to enlarge the hospital campus. The new entrance to the hospital has a spacious garden with Naum Gabo's fountain sculpture Revolving Torsion at its centre. There was a widespread public reaction against the appearance of the white-tiled thirteen storey main block upon its completion in 1975 - most notably from MPs who could see it from the river terrace of the Palace of Westminster. The southern part of the redevelopment, which would have included a second tall block, was never constructed. The three remaining Victorian ward pavilion blocks were refurbished in the 1980s

With the closure of the Dreadnought Seamen's Hospital at the Greenwich Hospital in 1986, services for seamen and their families was provided by the 'Dreadnought Unit' at St Thomas' Hospital. It allows eligible Merchant seafarers access to priority medical treatment, except cardiac surgery, and is funded by central government with money separate from other NHS trust funds. It originally consisted of two 28-bed wards, but nowadays Dreadnought patients are treated according to clinical need and so are placed in the ward most suitable for their medical condition.

The St John's Institute of Dermatology department at the hospital has specialist skin pharmacy, specialist operating theatres and the UK’s largest dermatology inpatient ward.[3]

Following the merger of Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals into one Trust, Accident and Emergency Services were consolidated at St Thomas' in 1990

Children's hospital departments are provided by Evelina Children's Hospital. This moved from Guy's Hospital into a new building designed by Michael Hopkins on south eastern part of the St Thomas's site in 2005. The design of the new hospital, which is focused on a four storey conservatory has won several architectural awards for the way it has been designed to provide a friendly environment for children, many of whom may be long term patients.

[edit] Trivia

  • St Thomas' is the nearest hospital to the Palace of Westminster. Any commoner who dies at the Palace of Westminster is recorded as having died there.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ St Thomas’s Hospital - A Concise History. gkt gazette. Guy's, King's & St.Thomas's Hospitals Medical & Dental Schools (February 2002 -continued in subsequent issues). Retrieved on 2006-11-05.
  2. ^ a b c St Thomas's Hospital Medical School Records. Archives in London and the M25 area (AIM25).
  3. ^ St John's Institute of Dermatology. Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust (December 2004). Retrieved on 2006-05-28.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../s/t/_/St_Thomas%27_Hospital_ac4f.html"
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