About Child Life and Health
Child Life and Health provides undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and conducts research in paediatric and adolescent medicine.
Child Life and Health seeks to foster and deliver internationally leading research and training into the causes, consequences and management of childhood onset diseases as well as optimising the healthy development of children and young people.
What happens within the department?
CLaH provides undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and conducts research in paediatric and adolescent medicine.
We collaborate with National Health Service (NHS) Researchers including the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, the Simpson Centre for Reproductive Health and Community Paediatrics, Lothian Primary Care Trust and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde.
We also have ongoing collaborations within the University of Edinburgh with embedded researchers in the Queen's Medical Research Institute, Chancellors Building and the Centre for Molecular Medicine.
History
The Department of Child Life and Health was established in 1931 when Charles McNeil was appointed as the first Edward Clark Professor of Child Life and Health in the University of Edinburgh. It was the first university chair to bear the designation “Child Health”. He called his chair and Department by this title as he wished that teaching and research should focus on the normal development of the child at a time when University teaching was still on conventional “diseases of children” lines. His professorial successors, Richard Ellis (1946-64), John Forfar (1964-83), James Farquhar (1983-87) and Neil McIntosh (1987-2007) and Robert Minns (2000 – 2008) have all carried on this tradition. Professor Jürgen Schwarze is the current Edward Clark Professor of Child Life and Health.
The Department was initially in Chalmers Street adjacent to the old Royal Infirmary and the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion but moved to numbers 15, 17 and 25 Hatton Place which is located opposite the Royal Hospital for Sick Children. It moved into its’ first purpose-built accommodation when the new Wing of RHSC was completed in August 1994.
Between 1980 and 1995, the Child Life and Health Department, jointly with the Ministry of Health in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, organised a Diploma of Child Health, which assisted in the training of over 400 postgraduate doctors in paediatrics in Saudi Arabia.
Location
In Spring 2021, CLaH re-located to the newly built Royal Hospital for Children and Young People in the BioQuarter at Little France to the South of Edinburgh.
