Treating The Illawarra
Illawarra Mercury
Saturday November 27, 2004
WOLLONGONG'S purple, pink and orange landmark hospital is a far cry from the first hospital built on the hill, now known as "hospital hill".
It was 1907 and Wollongong had outgrown its first hospital - the Albert Memorial - built in Flinders St in 1863.Back then, hospitals faced the same problems as today as population pressure put the squeeze on beds.The Wollongong hospital was the only one between Sydney and the Victorian border and patients came from as far as Bega.In 1885 the government medical officer visited Wollongong and noted the need for a larger, more central hospital.That year the Illawarra Mercury reported hospital accommodation being "taxed".The new hospital, built on the top of a knoll on Crown St, had a male ward with 12 beds, a female ward with six beds, and a "separation" ward.Garden Hill House, situated on the top of the hill, became an administrative block, the two buildings being connected by a glass walkway.By 1924, Wollongong District Hospital was registered as a four-year training school under the Nurses' Registration Act and the last hospital-based, general-trained nurses graduated in 1982.Over the years there were a series of additions and renovations to the hospital until, in 1998, Premier Bob Carr gave the go-ahead for an ambitious project to completely revamp the hospital.The brief presented to the architects was to link the relatively new clinical services block and the older, main hospital building into a homogenous whole ... something they did using strong colours to draw the disparate parts together.Now completed, the $81 million refit was the biggest capital works project in the hospital's 100-year history.In 1979, hospital options for Illawarra residents broadened with the opening of Figtree Private.The popular private hospital, now the Illawarra's largest and owned by Ramsay Health Care, has 320 employees, 101 beds, and offers medical, surgical, maternity and acute care as well as specialty services including cardiology, orthopaedics and urology.The hospital changed its name to Illawarra Private in the 1980s but it never jelled with the community and earlier this year, Ramsay reverted to the preferred Figtree Private.
© 2004 Illawarra Mercury
