| AdminHistory | The institution that became Summerfield Hospital began as the Birmingham Union Workhouse, which moved from its original site in Lichfield Street to Winson Green in 1852. In 1885 the Guardians decided to build a separate workhouse infirmary on an adjacent site, and this developed into a separate institution, later called Dudley Road Hospital (see HC DR), which catered primarily for those who were chargeable by reason of sickness. The workhouse continued to have a medical role, however, in providing for geriatric and venereal cases, as well as accommodating the able-bodied poor and vagrants.
In 1911-12 the boundaries of the Birmingham Union were expanded to match those of the City, and the workhouse was renamed Western Road House. In 1930 both the Workhouse and Dudley Road Hospital passed into the control of City Council's Public Assistance Committee under the Local Government Act 1929, which redesignated workhouses as public assistance institutions. In 1935 Western Road House was again renamed, this time as the Birmingham Infirmary; confusingly, it was also sometimes referred to as Western House and as Dudley Road Infirmary. By this time the former workhouse was mainly used to house the chronically sick elderly poor, although entries in the creed and baptism registers indicate that the Infirmary was still used to temporarily house younger people (particularly women going there to give birth or shortly after the birth of a child) until the early 1950s.
In 1948, control of both Hospital and Infirmary passed to the newly created National Health Service, and they were administered by the Dudley Road Hospital Management Committee. The name of the former workhouse was also changed again, this time to Summerfield Hospital, and the hospital continued to develop as a geriatric centre.
In 1974 Summerfield Hospital was incorporated into Dudley Road Hospital (now City Hospital), when it became Dudley Road Department of Geriatric Medicine. It was not until changes in social services provision for the elderly were introduced in 1984, meaning that long-term care was provided through residential and nursing homes, that the former Summerfield Hospital was finally closed. |