Over the past few months the Northumberland page has been thoroughly revised and expanded. The page covers hospitals within the current county of Northumberland, there is a separate pages for Tyne & Weir that covers Newcastle. Historic maps of the sites have been added in, and short accounts of the history of each building added, mostly based on the reports written for the Royal Commission’s Hospital Survey carried out in the 1990s. At that time many more of the pre-NHS hospitals were still in use, and others still standing. Although not all the historic hospitals of Northumberland have been lost, a great many have been demolished. The Royal Commission hospital files include now rare record photography of demolished sites. They can be found at Historic England Archive, based in Swindon, and can be seen by the public.

There are now twelve NHS hospitals in Northumberland with in-patient facilities: Berwick Infirmary; Blyth Community Hospital; Alnwick Infirmary; Haltwhistle War Memorial Hospital; North Tyneside General Hospital; Hexham General Hospital; Rothbury Community Hospital; Wansbeck General Hospital; Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital, Cramlington; St George’s Park, Morpeth; Ferndene, Prudhoe and Northgate Hospital, Morpeth. (There are other clinics and health centres that treat out-patients.)

Historically Newcastle provided the main hospital services for the county, with large teaching and specialist hospitals. Most of the population was concentrated in the city, the rest of the large county having a scattered population resulting in a network of relatively small hospitals. There have been at least thirty-five hospitals in Northumberland outside Newcastle in the past, including workhouses that would have had small infirmaries for the sick. That number does not include private nursing homes, which are generally not included on the historic-hospitals website (although I have slowly been adding ones that come to my attention). There are various reasons for their general exclusion, but mostly it is because they tended to occupy converted buildings, and the main focus of the historic-hospitals site is to explore the design of purpose-built hospitals.

The large reduction in the number of hospitals now part of the National Health Service reflects the way in-patient care has developed, with patients spending less time in hospital and more procedures being done in out-patient clinics or day-care units. Plans for post-war reconstruction and the need for some form of national health service were addressed during the Second World War. A national survey of hospitals was commenced in 1942, that was published in 1946. It covered most hospitals but excluded those for mental illnesses or disabilities, and few private nursing homes. The survey, together with the recommendations made in the published reports, laid the foundations for the administrative organisation of the NHS.

The report on the hospitals in the North East of England did not paint a rosy picture. The general acute hospitals were mostly found to be out-of-date, too small, and on sites that did not allow for expansion. Out-patient departments were particularly poor, inconvenient and cramped. Even then it was recognised that the demands on out-patient departments had steadily increased in step with medical progress, and would continue to do so ‘departments that were once regarded with pride are now recognised as hopelessly inadequate’. The rise in specialisms was also impacting on the problem, as new clinics had to somehow be shoe-horned into existing buildings. In those days there were no appointment systems in place, which only added to the difficulties. The survey recognised that some improvements had been made before the war, but many more plans had been set aside in 1939.

About 23 hospitals in the county of Northumberland were transferred to the NHS in 1948. These were nine cottage hospitals, three of the five former workhouses in the county, five out of the eight infectious diseases hospitals, three sanatoria (for tuberculosis), two smallpox hospitals, and one maternity hospital. They fell within the administrative area of the Newcastle Regional Hospital Board, a huge area that stretched across to Cumbria and down to Sunderland, Teeside, County Durham and parts of North Yorkshire. Day-to-day administration was carried out by 33 Hospital Management Committees. This remained the case until the 1974 reorganisation of the NHS which saw the introduction of smaller area health authorities. In the early 1990s most of the hospitals transferred in 1948 were still either in use or at least still standing. Many have been demolished relatively recently. Only Berwick and Alnwick Infirmaries continue in some of their original buildings to this day.