It’s a big weekend for Children’s Hospital at London Health Sciences Centre as officials get ready to light the candles for the hospital’s 100th birthday.
Children’s first opened its doors inside a three-storey building with 60 beds on Oct. 29, 1922, back when it was called the War Memorial Children’s Hospital of Western Ontario, in honour of those who fought in the First World War.
The facility was renamed Children’s Hospital of Western Ontario when it moved to its current location in 1985, before simplifying its name to Children’s Hospital in 2007.
Verna Woods was the hospital’s first patient and hundreds of thousands have followed in the time since.
Born prematurely at just over 1,000 grams in 1991, Steven McLean is among the innumerable children who have the hospital to thank for life-saving care.
McLean underwent 30 operations and made 100 emergency room visits along with countless follow-up appointments by the time he turned 18.
A few years later, McLean returned to the halls of Children’s Hospital, this time as a registered nurse.
“I’d known that I wanted to work in health care at least since I was 10. My mom is a nurse, she’s recently retired, but she still works casual, so I’m not sure if she’ll ever retire,” McLean says of his inspiration for taking on the role.
“I love her so much … she would tell me little stories about how work is and it just sort of stuck with me that I wanted to be a part of that.”
McLean says the job is already very rewarding and meaningful on its own, but notes the fulfillment it brings is amplified by working at the same hospital that gave him so much.
“It just means a lot to give back to the same organization that helped you so much … It feels like things came full circle.”
Children’s Hospital president Nash Syed says a week of celebrations and reflection has given him and his staff plenty to be proud of.
Some milestones include conducting Ontario’s first liver and heart transplants in children in 1984 and providing a six-month old girl with a liver, bowel, stomach and pancreas transplant in 1997. The young patient, Sarah Marshall, was later crowned the youngest multi-organ transplant recipient by Guinness World Records.
Looking ahead to the next 100 years, Syed says he’s most excited about the research and technological advances on the horizon.
“In the next 10 years, I think we’ll see a new Children’s Hospital … Right now, it is child-friendly, but not as much as it’s going to be in a few years, even this year. We’re going to wrap services around the patient, the families and make it very, very different,” Syed said.
Many of the services provided at the hospital are funded by the Children’s Health Foundation (CHF), a charity that was also established 100 years ago.
Donations to the CHF helped fund the ROSA ONE Brain, a newly-acquired state-of-the-art robotic arm that will be used this year at Children’s Hospital.
“We’re going to be the first to do it, I believe, in Ontario. We’re going to do a minimally-invasive surgery on an epileptic patient. So, where we used to do major surgery – whether its chest or head – we’d be opening them wide right up; we’re going to do it (instead) through a little keyhole,” Syed explained.
The hospital currently serves London, southwestern and western Ontario, as well as parts of northern Ontario and the United States.
Children’s Hospital is equipped with 12 critical care beds and 58 inpatient beds.
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