New age vision for hi-tech maternity hospital

COMPARING Cork’s main existing maternity hospital, the Erinville, to its successor, the Cork University Maternity Hospital (CUMH), is like comparing 1960s Ireland with the Celtic Tiger.

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.