Patients, staff, clowns and Elvis celebrate 60 years of children’s hospital

If laughter is the best medicine, the boys and girls in St Anne's Ward at Our Lady's Children's Hospital in Crumlin were at serious risk of an overdose on Monday morning. To their delight, Elvis was caught serenading a clown doctor while her friends ran riot under a canopy of helium balloons.

All the madness was organised to mark the hospital’s 60th birthday. Alongside a staff fancy-dress parade, the children were treated to a magic show, face painting, a disco and an enormous birthday cake.

It is far from all that levity and cake the hospital was reared, and staff were on hand to marvel at the way it has grown over the past 60 years and at the changes, too, in its technological and philosophical perspectives.

In 1957, it had 3,683 inpatients and 19,000 outpatients. Last year it treated 28,637 children on an inpatient basis, and 114,225 outpatients. The average length of stay for a patient was 17 days in 1957, compared with just five days last year.

It is not just science that has improved the outcomes for many patients; the manner in which they are cared for has changed dramatically too.

Lorraine Smith does a job that would have been unthinkable when the hospital opened: play specialist.

“We work with children to make their hospital visits as positive an experience as it can possibly be,” she said as the party got under way. “We know that it can be a very scary time for a child, especially if they are hooked up to all sorts of apparatus. So we have special dolls to show them what procedures are what and other dolls to help children cope with needle phobias. What is most important is that we explain everything to them in a play way, in a way they can understand. Our job is to take the fear out of what is happening.”

Relationship

Dr Paul Oslizlok has been a paediatric cardiologist since the early 1990s, but his relationship with the hospital dates back to 1978, when he first walked through the doors as a medical student. The birthday celebration caused him to reflect on how far the hospital has come and how far it has to go.

“I think this birthday is important because we are about to merge this hospital with the other children’s hospitals and there is an understandable fear that a lot of what is great about Crumlin will be lost,” he said. “Having said that, most of us do long for a time when all the children’s hospitals will come together, because it will be so much better. But there is a fear that some of the loyalty and camaraderie here will be lost.”

Since he first started training here almost 40 years ago, he has looked after “tens of thousands of children” and remembers many cases, both those with happy outcomes and others that he described as “devastating”.

Rachel Kenna, director of nursing at the hospital, described the birthday as “a huge day” for the hospital. She said it was “important that we make a big effort to celebrate what we have become. I have been here for 25 years and the changes over that time have been phenomenal”.

When asked what challenges are faced by the nursing staff, she did not hesitate.

“One of the biggest challenges we face is that we simply do not have enough nurses,” she said.

She added that one of the reasons paediatric nurses are in such short supply is that “you need to have something special to be a children’s nurse and you need to have a bag full of resilience. It can be a very long journey, and nurses build relationships with children. The children are very tactile and need to be hugged a lot. I think children’s nurses have that extra special ingredient and it is a very humbling experience to be a children’s nurse, to have the responsibility for looking after all these little people.”