IT was, said the Evening Times headline of March 15, 1971, a hospital 'where mum can stay the night’.
The first clinic had just opened in the out-patient department of the new Royal Hospital for Sick Children, at Yorkhill, Glasgow. The hospital would not become fully operational until the summer.
The department itself had 27 consulting rooms, two treatment rooms, plaster rooms and a variety of specialist services. The photograph shows a two-year-old from Sandyhills being attended to in the department’s orthopaedic section.
The eight-storey hospital was the first children’s hospital to be built in Scotland since before the Second World War. When fully functioning, it would have more than 320 beds, with play spaces and classrooms. Roughly 100 of the beds would be in single rooms, where parents would be able to stay overnight, if necessary.
Until the complete transfer to Yorkhill took place in the summer, two special clinics for children would be retained at the city’s Oakbank Hospital.
In June 2015 Yorkhill Sick Kids began a phased move to its new home at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, at the £842 million Queen Elizabeth University Hospital campus. The children’s hospital has 244 paediatric beds, the vast majority of the paediatric beds are in single rooms with space for overnight accommodation for parents.
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