The Belfast Hospital for Sick Children

THE staff of the Belfast Hospital for Sick Children for many years have been working under the most difficult and trying conditions. The hospital was built over half a century ago, and had become pitifully antiquated; the out-patient department was so congested that satisfactory work had become a physical impossibility, while the old equipment and long-since-obsolete type of operating-theatres and wards had become anything but a credit to the city of Belfast. This, however, is now changed. A new and modern children's hospital has taken the place of the old premises in Queen Street. It is built on the Falls Road, close to the Royal Victoria Hospital, on a plot of ground generously granted free of charge by the Corporation of the City of Belfast, and so complete and up to date is its plan and equipment that it is already one of the recognised show-places in Belfast medical circles. From the moment one enters the well-arranged James Rea waiting-hall of the out-patient departments, and passes through the superbly-fitted operating-theatres to the war(ls, to the kitchens and to the residential quarters for the staff, one is more and more astonishedl at the modernity of outlook which conceived the whole. The furniture of the operating-theatres is of stainless steel, the operating-tables are Down Brothers' latest pedestal type with oil-pump movements; the blankets for these tables are electrically heated, and the cupboards fitted with nickel-plated bascule locks. There are four of these theatres, two for the out-patient department and two for the wards. A blank cheque was given the hospital by the Atkinson family to purchase the furniture and equipment of the out-patient theatres, and another blank cheque was given by Mr. Fredrick Davis and Miss Davis to purchase the furniture and equipment of the ward theatres. The out-patient department, as is customary in children's hospitals, is much larger than the intern department, as the greater number of little patienits are treated by both surgeons and physicians as extern patients. In the old congested hospital in Queen Street, 13,251 patients were treated last year in the out-patient department, with 44,934 attendances, while the relatively small number of 799 patients were treated in the wards. A feature of this new hospital is the inclusion of a series of private wards for paying patients. This is in coinformity with the modern tendency to centralise medical services, and to enable people of moderate means to obtain for their little ones the most modern andl highly-specialised methods of treatment. There are baby wards set asidle from the main childlren's wards, and a number of small mothers' wards, in each of which a mother may be installed to be with and help nurse her little one, in those cases where it is undesirable to separate mother from child. TIhere is, too, an infectious wardl situated close to the out-patient hall, and isolated from the other warcls, so that any patient in whom there is the least doubt of infection may be (letained, and thus prevent the introduction of infectious disease to the hospital patients. Complkte massage an(d ultra-violet-ray treatment-rooms are also installed, and thet-e is a play-room, fitted with vita-glass, for convalescent patients. In the basement lhere is a completely-fitted laboratory for bacteriological and biochemical investigations, an electro-cardiograph, and a room in which it is lhoped soon to instal atn X-ray apparatus.