West Glasgow Ambulatory Care Hospital

History

The hospital has its origins in a facility at Garnethill which opened as the Hospital for Sick Children on 20 December 1882. 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. The hospital admitted its first patient, a 5-year-old boy with curvature of the spine, on 8 January 1883. The old hospital is now occupied by St Aloysius' College.

The hospital was suffering from a chronic lack of space by the 1900s and as a result a new site at Yorkhill was chosen for a replacement hospital building. A public appeal had raised almost £140,000. Designed by John James Burnet, the new building opened in July 1914.

In the 1930s Matthew White started operating on children with cleft lip and cleft palate. He brought in Anne McAllister to administer speech therapy so that the children could make a full recovery.

On 11 July 1964, the Queen Mother's Maternity Hospital opened on a site adjacent to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children. In 1966, the Royal Hospital for Sick Children was temporarily relocated to the former Oakbank Hospital buildings in Woodside in order to facilitate the demolition of the existing building, which was discovered to be suffering from severe structural defects. The move back to the rebuilt facility at Yorkhill began in October 1971 and the hospital was officially opened by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in 1972.

After services transferred to the new Royal Hospital for Children in Govan, the hospital at Yorkhill closed as a children's facility on 10 June 2015.

The hospital building reopened as the West Glasgow Ambulatory Care Hospital on 4 December 2015. The new ambulatory care facility was created to house the remaining outpatient services and the minor injury unit previously housed at the Western Infirmary.

References

References

1. "A Brief History of the Early Days of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Glasgow". Historical Hospital Admission Records Project.
2. Bradford, Eleanor. (8 December 2010). "Records reveal life at Victorian children's hospital". [[BBC News]].
3. "Our Campus". St Aloysius' College.
4. (7 July 2014). "Yorkhill hospital celebrates 100 years of caring for children". [[STV News]].
5. Renfrew, C. (2004-09-23). McAllister, Anne Hutchison (1892–1983), speech therapist and teacher. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 17 Jan. 2018, see [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-49235 link] {{Webarchive. link. (26 December 2020)
6. (13 January 2010). "Queen Mother's maternity hospital closes doors". BBC News.
7. (11 October 1971). "New children's hospital to be opened this week". [[The Glasgow Herald]].
8. "Records of Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Glasgow, Scotland". Archives Hub.
9. (11 June 2015). "End of an era as Yorkhill shuts its doors to emergency patients". [[Evening Times]].
10. "The Royal Hospital for Sick Children 1882-2015". [[NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde]].
11. (5 December 2015). "City's health services are on the move". [[Evening Times]].