The hospital has its origins in a facility at
Garnethill which opened as the Hospital for Sick Children on 20 December 1882. It took almost 22 years to come to fruition due to a dispute with the
University of Glasgow regarding a suitable site. When opened, the hospital had 58 beds. The hospital admitted its first patient, a 5-year-old boy with
curvature of the spine, on 8 January 1883. The old hospital is now occupied by
St Aloysius' College. The hospital was suffering from a chronic lack of space by the 1900s and as a result a new site at
Yorkhill was chosen for a replacement hospital building. A public appeal had raised almost £140,000. Designed by
John James Burnet, the new building opened in July 1914. In the 1930s Matthew White started operating on children with
cleft lip and cleft palate. He brought in
Anne McAllister to administer
speech therapy so that the children could make a full recovery. On 11 July 1964, the Queen Mother's Maternity Hospital opened on a site adjacent to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children. In 1966, the Royal Hospital for Sick Children was temporarily relocated to the former
Oakbank Hospital buildings in
Woodside in order to facilitate the demolition of the existing building, which was discovered to be suffering from severe structural defects. The move back to the rebuilt facility at Yorkhill began in October 1971 and the hospital was officially opened by
the Queen and the
Duke of Edinburgh in 1972. After services transferred to the new
Royal Hospital for Children in
Govan, the hospital at Yorkhill closed as a children's facility on 10 June 2015. The hospital building reopened as the West Glasgow Ambulatory Care Hospital on 4 December 2015. The new ambulatory care facility was created to house the remaining outpatient services and the minor injury unit previously housed at the
Western Infirmary. ==References ==