From rat-infested dump to heart of New Zealand: the painful birth of Starship

We need you to help us to Help Our Kids. The Herald is running a major campaign to try and raise at least $150,000 for our national children’s hospital, Starship. Each year, more than 9000 Kiwi kids from right throughout the country are treated in Starship’s theatres. Now it’s our turn to help the hospital and staff that Help Our Kids.

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Over the span of Dr Liz Segedin's career, central Auckland's children's hospital has gone from being a rat-infested but loveable dump, to a high-class facility that serves all of New Zealand and has a strong international reputation.

Dr Segedin, a senior doctor in the intensive care unit at the Starship hospital, began her career as a specialist in the 1980s at its predecessor, the Princess Mary Hospital.

She well recalls the difficult gestation, 1991 birth and adolescence of the Starship, the politics, and the rows among doctors and health officials following decades of demands to replace the old hospital.

She is an advocate for the upgrading and of Starship's 22-year-old operating theatres suite, including the addition of a seventh theatre. But even that project, she notes, carries a legacy of the alleged attempt to eradicate the organisation's status as children's hospital and make it simply a collection of wards tacked on to an adults' hospital.

She is referring to the reorganisation of the Auckland District Health Board's hospitals in the early 2000s, planned from the late 1990s. Managers and board members tried unsuccessfully to stop the official use of the names Starship and National Women's by making those hospitals simply the children's and women's services of the new Auckland City Hospital.

Dr Segedin says the plan at first included increasing Starship's theatre count to eight.

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"Those plans got scuttled. We've never understood quite why, but the consequences of not doing that then means we've been playing catch-up ever since, which is why this [current] expansion and renovation is so important.

"We actually need eight. That would have allowed us to start doing some complicated plastic surgery here, for example, which we just don't have the theatre capacity for."

Looking back to Princess Mary Hospital, Dr Segedin says that in its final days, it was run down, with "fleas, cockroaches and rats" but there was "a wonderful camaraderie and sense of purpose".

Under construction: Starship takes shape

"There were only two theatres. Additionally, minor operations, like lancing of abscesses, were often done in the corridor. People would wander in and out. You would barge through the theatres in your street clothes [on you way] to the tea room."

Starship - known at first as the Auckland Children's Hospital - replaced a facility built in 1942 for servicemen injured in the Pacific War. Children's hospital facilities in Auckland date from the 1890s and the first Princess Mary Hospital for Sick Children, named after the daughter of King George V, from 1918.

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Pressure for a new, purpose-built children's hospital grew from the mid-1950s and the battle became entrenched from the late 1970s.

According to the book written to mark Starship's 21st birthday: "Lines were formed ... with paediatric staff on the one side and a broad coalition on the other, comprising the Health Department, most of the hospital board and a substantial cohort of the medical establishment, drawn mostly from adult medicine but also from paediatrics."

The paediatricians were accused of being empire builders at public expense. They in turn argued that because children are physiologically different from adults, they should be treated in specialist children's facilities, not in adult wards as was the case in a number of specialties including intensive care.

The Auckland Hospital Board accepted the need for a new children's hospital from 1960, but there was never enough money. From 1981, however, there was a new political resolve to build the hospital, spurred by a public campaign generated by the predecessor of today's highly successful fundraising charity the Starship Foundation.

Paediatric radiologist Dr Paul White founded the New Children's Hospital Trust to raise money for the new hospital and to pressure the government. Under the heading; "Where we send our sick kids is the shame of Auckland", Princess Mary staff placed an ad in the Herald urging people to petition their MP and to donate to the trust.

Six years of haggling and planning followed before the $51.5 million construction project began and the hospital, built at a final cost of $78 million, opened in November 1991.

The following year brought the name Starship, dreamed up by marketing man Sir Bob Harvey as a way of softening the threat a hospital can pose to youngsters, and attracting charity dollars. At first it was disliked by some who considered it an intrusion of commercial values and who resented charity fundraising for a government service. But the name stuck, survived the attempt at its removal in 2003 and became a source of pride for many.

"It is well known and surprisingly so sometimes," says Starship emergency department specialist Dr Richard Aickin. "Even when I'm in North America or the United Kingdom it's a name which paediatricians are familiar with and are quite interested in what we are doing."

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