Lancashire Teaching Hospitals Sharoe Green Maternity Unit celebrates its 20th anniversary today, marking two decades of providing care for women and their families at Royal Preston Hospital.
Named in honour of the maternity hospital it replaced, the £17m maternity and gynaecology unit was built with new maternity delivery suites and wards, ultrasound department, antenatal clinic, neo-natal unit, a special early pregnancy assessment unit, gynaecology outpatient department and 28-bed ward with three operating theatres.
Over the last 20 years the Trust has seen numerous upgrades and advancements to the maternity unit, most recently with the new LeAPH clinic for women with pre-eclampsia or hypertension.
There are different services provided on each floor: Ground floor - Antenatal clinic, Maternity Triage and ultrasound (radiographers), Gynae clinic / secretaries/ Advanced Gynae nurses; First floor – Early Pregnancy Assessment Unit, Gynae ward, Preston Birthing Centre and Maternity Antenatal and Postnatal wards; Second floor – Delivery Suite, Theatres and Neonatal Unit.
This week, we will be marking the 20th anniversary with a special news edition every day, each focussing on colleagues or patients who remember the old unit and what it has become today fondly.
Today we start with Sean Hughes, who in 2004 was a Consultant Obstetrician and Clinical Director for women’s health.
He recalls the switchover from the old to the new unit was a particularly manic weekend: “We had two on-call teams for each site, we were still admitting patients to the old Sharoe Green on the Friday through to Saturday morning, and from 8am Saturday morning, we were admitting people to the new unit. My abiding memory was of one of our Consultants who did her shift on the Friday night, including the last emergency Caesarean section about 7am on the Saturday before we moved over to the new unit. Then she went over to the new theatres later that morning to lend a hand and ended up doing the first Caesarean there!”
Back in 2004, there was a Neonatal Unit with one ANNP (Advanced Neonatal Nurse Practioner), and now there is a NICU with complex care, and the Trust is the Maternal Medicine Lead for Lancashire and South Cumbria and Foetal Management teams.
Bringing everything on to one site has enabled cross-speciality collaboration, especially for expectant mothers - the Trust is now the only provider in the North West to have co-located NICU and Adult Critical Care/Oncology/Neurosurgery and Interventional Radiology all on one site.
Sean remains proud of the facility and the care that has been provided over the years: “Everyone came together to make it work, and there was huge pride in the place. If you give people good kit and facilities, it is better, and it was a massive improvement on what had gone before.
“You could have taken the staff and put them in a tent in the park and the care would have been fantastic, so the real essence is the staff, but it was great to have proper theatres, and to have our own unit. It was built for the right reasons.
“From a clinical point of view, having a maternity unit close to intensive care and close to facilities is much better than a 15-minute walk down the road. Safety-wise it was much better. It was a great thing to happen, a massive positive.”
