: Health Hinge

Whitchurch Hospital is a psychiatric hospital in Whitchurch, an area in the north of Cardiff. As well as general psychiatry, services include elderly psychiatry, neuropsychiatry, forensic psychiatry, rehabilitation and addiction services. It is part of the Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust.

The hospital was previously named the Cardiff City Asylum. It was founded in 1904 and opened on the 15th April 1908. The current facilities are considered obsolete and unsuitable for the requirements of 21st Century psychiatry. As a result, there is an ongoing programme to phase out and replace the current building. Some facilities have been moved to newly-built units elsewhere, such as the acute psychiatric wards at the LLanfair Unit, Llandough Hospital. Other wards have been replaced by community-based services such as Crisis Resolution and Home Treatment Teams. The remaining facilities will be moved to a new purpose-built hospital to be constructed on the site of the adjoining Tegfan Day Hospital. This new hospital is expected to be completed in 2010.

Getting to the University Hospital of Wales has become easier over the past few years. Links with Cardiff Bus have made the hospital accessible from all areas of Cardiff. Services by other companies such as Veolia & Stagecoach offer services from outside Cardiff.

Cardiff Bus operate services:
1 to Roath, Penylan, Tremorfa, Splott & City Centre
2 to Canton, Leckwith, Grangetown, Cardiff Bay & City Centre
8 to City Centre & Cardiff Bay
9/9A to City Centre, Grangetown & International Sports Village
51 to Cathays & City Centre - which continues as 95 to Dinas Powys, Llandough & Barry
53 to Cyncoed, Pentwyn, Llanedeyrn & Penylan
85 to Thornhill, Lisvane & Llanishen
86 to Lanishen & Lisvane
101/102 to Fairwater, Pentrebane & Ely
101/102 to Roath, Penylan, St Mellons & Llanrumney

Veolia Transport Cymru operate services:
22 to Rhiwbina & Pantmawr
86 to Llanishen & Lisvane
200 to Church Village

Stagecoach in South Wales operate services:
A/B to Thornhill & Caerphilly

The University Hospital Of Wales is also home to Radio Glamorgan, which broadcasts via Patientline on Channel 1.

2007 marks the station’s 40th birthday & many events have been organised to celebrate.

Radio Glamorgan provides music & entertainment to staff, visitors and most importantly patients of the UHW 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

In 2005, a million pound project by base structures was completed, a specially designed walkway which joins one part of the hospital to the other.

The Hospital also boasts its large Concourse which is situated at the main entrance of the Hospital. It contains a reception and many retail shops for use by visitors, staff and patients of the Hospital. It also contains many specialist services for use by patients and their families.

University Hospital of Wales (referred to locally as “the Heath” or UHW), opened in 1971, is a major 1000-bed hospital situated in the inner city district of Heath in Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom.

It is also the third largest University Hospital in the UK and is the largest hospital in Wales[1], providing 24 hour Accident & Emergency and various other specialist departments.

The hospital is split into 3 Blocks (A,B + C Block).

It is also a teaching hospital of Cardiff University School of Medicine.

The Western Infirmary is a teaching hospital situated in the West End of Glasgow, Scotland. There is also a Maggie’s centre at the hospital to help cancer patients, as well as the Glasgow Clinical Research Facility.

In the 1870s, when the University of Glasgow moved from the city centre to the West End, distancing itself from the Royal Infirmary, a new teaching hospital was built as part of the new university buildings[1]. Initially only having 150 beds, by 1911 this had increased to over six hundred. In the 1960s a rebuilding programme began that saw most of the original buildings replaced within a decade[1].

The Western Infirmary opened as a voluntary hospital relying upon donations and bequests from members of the public[2], but in 1948 with the introduction of the National Health Service the Western came under the management of the Glasgow Western Hospitals Board of Management[3].

In 2002, NHS Greater Glasgow announced the results of a three year consultation, the Greater Glasgow’s Acute Services Review, wherein they outlined a £700 million modernisation plan for Glasgow’s hospitals. As part of the plan, services will be transferred to expanded facilities at Gartnavel General Hospital and in 2013 the Western Infirmary will be shut down. [4][5]

The Western General Hospital (often abbreviated to simply “The Western General”), at Crewe Road, Edinburgh, Scotland is part of NHS Lothian, a Heath Board which provides a comprehensive range of adult and paediatric care to the people of Edinburgh, the Lothians and beyond.

It is one of the main teaching hospitals affiliated to the University of Edinburgh Medical School. It houses the neurology and neurosurgery centre for south east Scotland (”Department of Clinical Neurosciences”), the regional oncology and haematology Units, the regional Colorectal Surgical Unit and the Stroke Research Unit for Lothian. There is a major national cancer research and treatment centre at the hospital. The first Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centre opened at the Western General in 1996.

The hospital also contains the Adult Cystic Fibrosis Unit. (Clinical services in Scotland for adults with cystic fibrosis are also provided from Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and Gartnavel General Hospital in Glasgow.) The Edinburgh team runs an outreach clinic in Dundee, and the University of Dundee is home to the cystic fibrosis audit database, which collects data on all registered CF patients to monitor their health trends. Training and support is also available for patients and their carers to facilitate and maximise independent living and to encourage community based management wherever possible, and there is also provision for in-patient and day case clinical management.

Tayside Children’s Hospital is a children’s hospital in Dundee, Scotland and is attached to Ninewells Hospital. It serves children who live in Dundee, Angus, Perth and Kinross and north east Fife and, as such, it was so named after a region rather than a city to reflect the wide area that it covers.[1]

The facility, which cost ten million pounds to fund, was formally opened on 7 June 2006 in a ceremony involving television celebrity Fred MacAulay, University of Dundee principal Sir Alan Langlands, nurses, doctors and young patients.[2] The hospital combines medical services for children aged from prenatal to fourteen years of age with research departments specialising in paediatrics, and was financed by NHS and Dundee University funds and with money raised by various children’s charity organisations. The major driver behind TICH was the professor of Child Health Richard Olver, who spent a considerable period of his latter years in post campaigning for funds from charities and the public sector.

Included within the hospital are Ward 29 (the children’s medical ward), Ward 30 (the children’s surgical ward), Ward 40 (the neonatal unit), a high dependency unit, the maternity department, children’s surgical rooms, a children’s outpatient clinic, an ambulatory bay and a Maternal and Child Health clinic. There are also an outdoor play area/garden and an indoor play centre, which also houses an area that provides entertainment equipment aimed specifically at adolescents, as well as Ronald McDonald suites for families to reside in while their child is hospitalised.[3] Clinical research into conditions such as cystic fibrosis, asthma, diabetes, prematurity, etc is conducted at the unit in the hopes of developing further treatments and better enable medication trials that would normally only be offered to adults.

The idea of a children’s hospital in Dundee had been considered since 1995 but, although the children’s wards under went major upgrading,[4]Tayside Children’s Hospital is more accurately described as being a children’s unit within an adult hospital. The money intended for an actual children’s hospital was instead diverted to the reconstruction of Royal Aberdeen Children’s Hospital.[citation needed]

Richard Wilson, OBE worked as a lab technician at the hospital for several years before becoming an actor.

Alasdair Gray’s 1981 novel Lanark features a complex, rambling building called The Institute which the author states was physically inspired by Stobhill and BBC Television Centre in London.

A poem was written about Stobhill by the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan. It was based on a true story about a girl who became pregnant but then had an abortion. The baby was thus delivered dead, but while on its way to the incinerator was successfully resuscitated. A newspaper wrote about it at the time, but nobody knows what happened to the baby afterwards.

Stobhill lacks the traditional “hospital smell” in much of its main building, due to ongoing construction work and a café which gives off a smell of fried food.

Craig Ferguson, host of The Late, Late Show, was born in Stobhill Hospital on 17 May 1962.

There has been controversy over the results of a three year consultation, published in 2002, the Greater Glasgow’s Acute Services Review by NHS Greater Glasgow, in which it was decided to downgrade facilities at the hospital and replace it with a £100million outpatient Ambulatory care facility - due to open in 2009, which will result in the nearest Accident and Emergency and inpatient facilities being located at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in the city centre. The new hospital will cover four floors, and in addition to the existing outpatient clinics, day surgery and diagnostic services, it will also provide a number of specialist health services such as cardiology, renal dialysis and gynaecology. It will also have 12 short stay surgical beds, which will enable clinicians to extend the range of nominally outpatient surgical procedures offered within the new hospital. It will also have a minor injuries unit. Another component of the new Stobhill will be the development of a 111-bed inpatient Psychiatric hospital at the site. This resulted in Jean Turner’s election as the Independent Member of the Scottish Parliament for Strathkelvin and Bearsden on this single issue in 2003.
Eriskay House, a 15-bed inpatient ward opened in October 2004 as an addition to the existing MacKinnon House adult inpatient mental health unit. This purpose-built ward, which replaces inpatient services at the former Parkhead and Ruchill hospitals, provides a wide range of services for patients with drug and alcohol problems.
Another phase of this new project, the £18m Rowanbank Clinic, opened in July 2007. It is a new 74-bed mental health secure care centre, which will become fully operational on a phased basis over the next 18 months. This new £18m facility will dramatically improve services for people with mental health problems who may pose a risk to others or have the potential to commit an offence because they are mentally ill. It will provide specialist treatment and support in modern, purpose-built accommodation designed to meet the specific needs of patients and staff.
An additional facility, Skye House, will open in late 2007 and replaces an existing interim facility for young people at Gartnavel Royal Hospital. Housing 24 beds, the £7m purpose-built unit will have separate residential, educational and therapeutic facilities and has been specifically designed to meet the needs of young people who need inpatient mental health care.
Work has already begun on the new Ambulatory Care and Diagnostic Facility, three old ward blocks on the site have been demolished, and work has been completed on the groundworks and drainage, with the external framework taking shape. It is estimated that from 2009, the hospital will care for 400,000 patients annually from the North and East of Glasgow, East Dunbartonshire and further afield. The new facility will concentrate on general outpatient and diagnostic services, physiotherapy, podiatry, occupational therapy, dietetics, speech and language therapy, renal dialysis, heart and lung investigations, cardiac rehabilitation, elderly day care, diabetic care, a chronic pain service, x-rays, CT scans, MRI scans, ophthalmology, dentistry, ENT and audiology, gynaecology investigations, haematology and dermatology. It will be one of Scotland’s largest hospitals covering four floors and an area the size of 30,000 square metres.
Marie Curie Cancer Care is building a brand new purpose-built hospice at Stobhill. The charity plans to start building the new hospice in 2007 and hopes to complete it in 2008. The new 30 roomed hospice will replace the charity’s existing building in nearby Belmont Road which cares for more than 1,200 patients and their families each year.