It’s been the birthplace of more than 300,000 Western Australians. This week, King Edward Memorial Hospital (KEMH) celebrates 100 years of caring for the State’s women and babies.
KEMH opened its doors in 1916, following a campaign by prominent Western Australian women including Edith Cowan, Mary Molloy and Deborah Hackett.
As our State’s first maternity hospital, KEMH had three large wards for 20 patients, delivery rooms, an operating theatre, an isolation ward and staff quarters. The KEMH Advisory Board was established the same year it opened with Edith Cowan as a founding member.
In its first year, KEMH delivered 304 babies. Today almost 6,000 babies are born at the hospital each year, accounting for about 20 per cent of all births in WA.
In addition to the thousands of babies it safely welcomes into the world, KEMH also cares for more than 5,000 women with gynaecological conditions.
A further 2000-plus premature and unwell newborns every year are cared for in the hospital’s neonatal unit – the largest in the southern hemisphere.
The hospital is home to Australia’s only postnatal mental health unit to be located onsite at a women’s hospital rather than a psychiatric facility, and to the country’s first donor human milk bank that provides more than 1000 litres of breast milk each year to premature and unwell babies.