Sturdy Backbone of Hospital Life
By IRVINE, Denise
The red lino corridor is a lifeline for bewildered visitors to follow when negotiating the maze of Waikato Hospital. Denise Irvine joins the flow along a critical artery. ——————–
The woman in the lift of the new parking building at Waikato Hospital has a note with the name of her destination on it. She’s a stranger around these parts, she’s headed for a ward in the Menzies building, and she’s baffled. A volunteer attendant takes charge and shows her a map: “When you get out of the lift, follow the red line to the red corridor,” he says. “Once you’re on the red corridor, love, you can’t go wrong. Menzies is sign- posted from there.”
Last seen, the woman is striding purposefully down the avenue of red linoleum and endless signs, sidestepping wheelchairs, straggling family groups, kids carrying a bunch of flowers, uniformed hospital staff, mail trolleys, food trolleys, and patients in beds being wheeled to a new destination. Chaplain Alan Leadley is engaged in conversation near the chapel entrance, hospital attendants Julie Nevill and Jill Singh are doing the rounds with mail deliveries, and a young mother shepherds three fractious youngsters down the red line towards the green corridor heading to the Elizabeth Rothwell building.
Welcome to the Red Corridor: Spine of the hospital, running east- west, the main artery, lifeblood, hospital highway to life, death, work, lunch, and everything in between. Most Waikato people know the red corridor, the almost 1km long passageway of ageing-but-still- sturdy red linoleum that links six major buildings, countless services, and leads to pink, green, blue and other corridors that take you to various parts of the hospital.
You can’t escape the red corridor, even if you want to. In 1984, both my parents died in Waikato Hospital, and the corridor is part of my jumbled memories of that time as I navigated my way to their various wards, got in and out of lifts at all hours of the day and night, and went to appointments with specialists and the like. For months afterwards, I couldn’t face the red lino and tried to find other routes to visit friends in hospital. It was too difficult to avoid it; you really can’t go anywhere at Waikato Hospital without walking the red line.
Was it planned? When did it start? What is its future as the hospital plans significant rebuilding in the next few years? No one can put an exact date on its development, or who chose or supplied the industrial-strength lino, because as various major buildings have been added, the red spine has gradually been stretched and patched further and it’s hard to nail (no pun intended) its start.
Interestingly, a photograph of the hospital campus in 1936 shows a vastly different place, but the old wards and other services sit in a similar location to today’s tower blocks and their connecting spine runs pretty much parallel to today’s red corridor. The earliest corridor is noted in Dr Rex Wright-St Clair’s history publication, From Cottage to Regional Base Hospital, Waikato Hospital 1887-1987: Detailing the construction of the “new” hospital in 1905, Wright-St Clair says: “The building included a main corridor, which still stands, running in an east-west direction, with three wards opening off it to the north and numbered from one to three from east to west . . . it was a simple and sound design.” The corridor mentioned by Wright-St Clair remains part of today’s red pathway.
Retired staff member Helen Fahey, a member of the Waikato Hospital Memorabilia Trust, started work at the old Campbell Johnstone maternity unit in 1957 and she can’t remember a time when there wasn’t a red corridor. Around that period, she thinks it linked Campbell Johnstone to the main part of the hospital with all the wards opening off it.
Fahey held a number of senior positions at the hospital until she retired 12 years ago; she has watched the red corridor grow and change: “It is like the blood flow, the artery.” She is part of a voluntary group led by retired Waikato Hospital physician Peter Rothwell which is preserving hospital history, identifying and “rescuing” equipment, photos and other memorabilia for future displays. When she goes back to the hospital, Fahey says the red corridor makes the place totally familiar, “it is like going back home to me”.
Brendan Hague, Waikato Hospital’s senior project manager, operations, came to the campus in the late 1960s; he quips he started washing dishes in the kitchen and has held many other positions in the following 40 or so years. Hague knows every corner of the sprawling site, and if he had a dollar for every time he’s traversed the red line he’d be a very wealthy man. As he walks the corridor on this Monday afternoon, he meets and greets colleagues and visitors, and takes time to helpfully offer directions to a woman uncertain of where she’s headed.
Hague points out where the various buildings start and finish on the corridor, although to the untrained eye much of this appears seamless. He suggests we go up to the roof of the Smith block to see the spine from above, a better place to pick out the connections. When you examine the different roof-lines with an expert, you can see the red route has been carefully considered as each new part has been added. The 1905 roughcast building described in Wright-St Clair’s book still fits into the jigsaw puzzle of old and new departments.
Says Hague: “It would have been deliberate design, based on the old traditional spine of a hospital, and it has been maintained through some pretty challenging building projects from the 1920s to the 1970s.” Although it appears not to be documented, Hague thinks the major part of the red lino as we know it today would have been laid in the mid- 1970s with the opening of the major surgical block, the Menzies building.
Nowadays, it is even more important as it links to the new 18- level carparking building and is the key marker on the information map carried by many visitors. The red corridor doesn’t go all the way to the carpark, but there are helpful red squares set into grey lino to indicate the main artery is not far out of reach. Just as important – but totally unseen – is the tunnel underneath the corridor which carries vital wiring, pipes and other technical infrastructure.
More challenges lie ahead for the red route, with major works such as the new Waikato Clinical Centre and a new Emergency Department planned. A diversionary corridor will be required during some of the demolition and construction.
Statistics on foot traffic don’t cover visitor numbers, but it is estimated there are about 4000 patient journeys and 1200 staff journeys a day. “This is not exact science you understand,” says Hague, and judging by the ebb and flow at Monday lunchtime an accurate head count would be as tricky as counting heads at the Boxing Day sales.
JAN ADAMS, Health Waikato chief operating officer, came to Waikato Hospital in 1996 as director of nursing. Her office was just off the red corridor and she jokes she spent her first three months trying not to get lost. People kept saying to her “if you find the red corridor, you’ll be right”. It saved her on a number of occasions, she says. Adams is from Yorkshire, England, and Waikato’s red marker line is unique in her hospital experience. “It makes a lot of sense.”
Today Adams’ office is on the pink corridor in the Kempthorne building, not far from the red line. And, of course, she now threads her way confidently among the throng, taking a “tour de red corridor” from the east (where it enters the Waiora Waikato building) to west, towards the grey lino and new carpark building. She points to the major services leading off the main thoroughfare and I learn a few links I’d never noticed before. Just read the map, follow the red line and, as people told Adams when she first arrived, “you’ll be right”.
We visit the chapel, a calm oasis just a step away from the crowd. It is a reminder of the work and nature of this place; Adams says sometimes there are distressed people congregated on the red corridor, families who perhaps have just had a bereavement: “You can see something tragic has occurred.”
She recalls holding up hospital sheets on one occasion to screen a visitor who suffered a cardiac arrest on the red corridor; she was trying to offer privacy during resuscitation. Adams pauses constantly on this walk, greeting colleagues, perhaps getting a quick work update. “Informal hospital business is done here,” she comments.
The atmosphere changes in the evening, she says, when the hospital quietens down. Adams mentions the red lino was due to be replaced but with major demolition and rebuilding ahead (and increased foot traffic anticipated) this has been delayed. When it happens, the new lino will have to be red: “It just wouldn’t be the same.”
Making History appears fortnightly in the Times. If you have stories or people to tell us about, please contact Denise Irvine, ph 07 8499580 or email denise.irvine@waikatotimes.co.nz
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