New age vision for hi-tech maternity hospital
While quality of care and medical standards at the Erinville Hospital have always been of the highest calibre, the building is antiquated and gloomy. And as birth rates soar, space is at a premium.
At times women have queued for showers, which were situated off the corridor, there were often several women in the labour wards and space constraints meant that miscarrying women sometimes had to share wards with newborns.
However, if the older Irish maternity hospitals often bear the architectural hallmarks of industrial schools, the Cork University Maternity Hospital is a five-star hotel. Work began on the hospital in 2001. It will be March 2007 before women and babies are transferred from the Erinville, St Finbarr’s and the Bon Secours hospital to the new building.
The six-storey triangular-shaped building is sited at the front of Cork University Hospital (CUH). To enter the hospital, you cross a canopied footbridge from the old campus before entering the glass-fronted new frontier. It is here that the hotel analogy is most apparent as maple and walnut desks and greenery greet you and you’re hit with the first sense of how bright this building is.
CUMH commissioning manager Nora Geary said: “That was the plan. We really wanted it to be very bright and cheery as a maternity hospital is all about life and vitality.”
Ms Geary, a former midwife, is also manager of the existing health board maternity hospitals at the Erinville and St Finbarr’s.
From the start, the project to develop a state-of-the-art maternity hospital was governed by patient and staff needs. Questionnaires were given to hundreds of women who’d given birth in Cork’s other hospitals, while staff have had a huge input into the technological developments at the new 864-room building.
The new unit will be able to cater for 7,500 new births per year.
The biggest ward at CUMH has just four beds. Every ward also has its own shower, toilet and bidet. And each bed will have its own flat-screen TV.
In total there are almost 150 obstetric beds - 36 single wards, 36 double wards and eight four-bed wards. There are also six high-dependency beds. The neo-natal unit, which is one of the biggest in Europe, holds 50 cots.
There will be 12 birthing suites, or delivery rooms, each with individual showering and toilet facilities. There will also be a birthing pool and a ‘home from home’ room which can be used by people who seek a less-clinical labour.
Day services are based on the first floor with an emergency room, foetal assessment unit, ultrasound suites and three suite-outpatient unit.
With the opening of CUMH, there will be a dedicated 18-bed gynaecological ward on the top floor and dedicated operating theatre facilities. Existing services will also be maintained at the South Infirmary/Victoria Hospital. The top floor also has eight beds dedicated to pregnancy loss and counselling rooms are available as well as day rooms on each floor. Paediatrics will also be transferred to CUMH.
Barrier nursing rooms - a must in this era of MRSA awareness - have also been built and fibre-optic links connect the outpatient clinic, the ultrasound rooms and operating theatres to the UCC education facilities on the fifth floor. Links can also be made with medical consultants anywhere else in the world.
As we walk around the building, we meet CUMH Professor of Obstetrics & Gynaecology John Higgins who is beaming as he shows a visiting colleague from Harvard, clearly impressed, around the project.
“The fibre-optic links will be a huge benefit to postgraduate training and should help attract more British trainees to postgraduate courses here in Cork,” explains Professor Higgins.
