Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Glasgow
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The Royal Hospital for Sick Children Yorkhill, Glasgow ( ) is a hospital specialising in Pediatric healthcare. It is commonly referred to simply as Yorkhill. The hospital provides care for newborn babies right up to children around 13 years of age, including a specialist Accident and Emergency facility.
The hospital was originally completed at Garnethill in 1882 and opened on 20 December as the Hospital for Sick Children. It took almost 22 years to come to fruition due to a dispute with the University of Glasgow regarding a suitable site.
When opened, the hospital had 58 beds. On 8 January 1883, the hospital admitted its first patient, a 5-year-old boy with curvature of the spine.
A further 16 beds were added in 1887 when Thomas Carlyle converted a house next door into an annexe. The hospital was given Royal patronage in 1889 when the prefix was added to its title.
The hospital was suffering from a chronic lack of space by the 1900's and as a result a new site at Yorkhill was chosen for the replacement hospital building. Designed by John James Burnet, the new building opened in July 1914. In 1966, the Queen Mother's Maternity Hospital opened on a site adjacent to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children. Also in that year, the Royal Hospital for Sick Children was temporarily relocated to the former Oakbank Hospital buildings in Maryhill in order to facilitate the demolition of the existing building, which was discovered to be suffering from severe structural defects. The new Royal Hospital for Sick Children building was reopened at Yorkhill by Queen Elizabeth II in 1972 and coupled with the Queen Mother's Maternity Hospital, effectively established a national centre of integrated Obstetrics and Pediatric healthcare. A new operating theatre complex opened in 1998 and a new Intensive Care Unit opened in April 2005. The Hospital currently has 266 inpatient beds, 12 daycase beds, and handles approximately 90,000 out-patients, 15,000 in-patients and 7,300 daycases every year. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde are planning to close the Queen Mother's Maternity Hospital and re-locate the Royal Hospital for Sick Children to the Southern General Hospital site in Govan (which is being comprehensively redeveloped) where it is planned to open in 2011. The new £100 million hospital will be integrated with the existing Maternity unit at the Southern General Hospital as well as the existing Adult Hospital facilities.
