Aberdeen Royal Infirmary

Aberdeen Royal Infirmary is the largest hospital in the Grampian area, located on the Foresterhill site in Aberdeen, Scotland. ARI is a teaching hospital with around 900 inpatient beds, offering tertiary care for a population of over 600,000 across the north of Scotland. It offers all medical specialities with the exception of heart and liver transplants. It is managed by NHS Grampian. History The hospital has it origins in a facility established at Woolmanhill in 1739. The move to the current site formed part of the Aberdeen Joint Hospitals Scheme as envisaged by Professor Matthew Hay, which involved the development of an integrated medical campus at Foresterhill. The granite buildings on the site were designed by James Brown Nicol. The hospital was officially opened by the Duke and Duchess of York on 23 September 1936 – King Edward VIII had been due to open the infirmary but he called off his visit and instead went to Ballater railway station to meet Wallis Simpson off her train. The first patients were admitted a month later and the hospital joined the National Health Service in 1948. In 1984, a hyperbaric oxygen unit was built for the treatment of decompression illness and the hospital's in vitro fertilisation unit achieved a number of successful pregnancies in 1985, its first year of operation. In 1986, a new £550,000 out-patient eye clinic opened, offering corrective laser eye surgery, and in 1989, the hospital introduced a breast cancer screening service for women over the age of 50, with X-rays taken every three years.