KEMH history and Alumni

History

King Edward Memorial Hospital (KEMH) – known fondly as King Eddies to generations of locals – opened its doors in 1916 following campaigning by prominent West Australian women including Edith Cowan, Mary Molloy (the wife of the Lord Mayor) and Deborah Hackett. The original hospital was housed on the site of a converted Government Industrial School on Barker Road in Subiaco. This building, called Harvey House, still makes up part of the grounds and is now home to the WA Medical Museum (external site).

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 around 6,500 babies are born at the hospital every year and come from all over Western Australia. In the largest neonatal unit in the southern hemisphere, a further 2000+ premature and unwell newborns are cared for every year. Alongside the thousands of babies we safely welcome into the world, KEMH also cares for more than 5,000 women with gynaecological conditions.

KEMH is home to Australia’s only postnatal mental health unit located onsite at a women’s hospital rather than a psychiatric facility, and to the country’s first donor human milk bank – PREM Milk Bank (external site) – that provides more than 1000 litres of breast milk each year to premature and unwell babies.

In 1989 KEMH welcomed the world’s first IVF quintuplet birth and in January 2016 we celebrated the second set of quintuplets to be born at the hospital.

The hospital employs more than 1200 people.

King Edward Memorial Hospital Alumni

The King Edward Memorial Hospital Alumni (external site) was born in 2011 – the hospital’s 95th year.

It’s an independent non-profit incorporated association founded on the belief that current and past staff members, students, graduates and volunteers have valuable experience to offer mentoring and retaining new staff. The Alumni provides a forum for education, fellowship and the exchange of ideas, through social, educational and fundraising events.