Tayside Children's Hospital is a children's hospital in Dundee, Scotland, and is attached to Ninewells Hospital. It serves children, age from birth up until their fourteenth birthday, 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.
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. 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. 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 underwent major upgrading, Tayside Children's Hospital is more accurately described as being a children's unit within an adult hospital. It holds the term 'children's hospital' purely due to the research department and to better justify the closure of the children's ward and special baby care unit at Perth Royal Infirmary. The money intended for an actual children's hospital was instead diverted to the reconstruction of Royal Aberdeen Children's Hospital.
Famous quotes containing the words children and/or hospital:
“Here may I not ask you to carry those inscriptions that now hang on the walls into your homes, into the schools of your city, into all of your great institutions where children are gathered, and teach them that the eye of the young and the old should look upon that flag as one of the familiar glories of every American?”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“Radio put technology into storytelling and made it sick. TV killed it. Then you were locked into somebody else’s sighting of that story. You no longer had the benefit of making that picture for yourself, using your imagination. Storytelling brings back that humanness that we have lost with TV. You talk to children and they don’t hear you. They are television addicts. Mamas bring them home from the hospital and drag them up in front of the set and the great stare-out begins.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)