| Administrative History | Aboyne Hospital, Aberdeenshire was one of several isolation or infectious disease hospitals built in the last decade of the nineteenth century. This was largely a result of the 1889 Local Government Act which made local authorities responsible for providing hospital accommodation for infectious disease and fever cases.
Although the Act came into force in 1890 the hospital at Aboyne was not built until some years later. This was due firstly to the difficulty in finding an appropriate site and also to the opposition of local inhabitants. They were worried that the value of their property would decrease if a fever hospital were built in the area and afraid that the water supply might be contaminated. Local people took up a collection and offered the resulting £1,000 to Deeside District Council in an effort to persuade them to build the hospital elsewhere. Their action came too late as the Council had acquired a site near the railway station, on the outskirts of the town, and building had already begun.
Mainly local contractors were used, with Aboyne firms John Burgess and Son and Messrs. Wright and Sons doing the masonwork and slating. By mid-1898 the hospital, which originally consisted of the central block and one two-ward pavilion, was ready to admit its first patient.
In the early years the main diseases treated in the hospital were scarlet fever and diphtheria, with the occasional cases of enteric or typhoid fever. To begin with, annual admissions seldom managed to reach double figures, but by 1911 this had climbed to thirty and more. In 1914 the start of the First World War put a temporary end to talk of extending the hospital. When the war was over the hospital acquired a motor ambulance, the original horse-drawn model, which was stationed at the Huntly Arms, being deemed inefficient. The proposed extension to the hospital finally went ahead in the late 1920s when a second ward block was constructed, bringing the accommodation to 36 beds.
With the introduction of better hygiene and other preventative measures, the incidence of infectious disease had decreased to such an extent that Aberdeen County Council (which had taken the hospital over in 1930) decided it could reduce its complement of fever hospitals from twelve to five. Aboyne was one of those retained and the 1930s were the hospital's busiest years: between 1934 and 1936 almost 1,000 patients were admitted. The addition of the second ward block had therefore been most timely. With the hospitals at Ballater and Braemar closed, Aboyne was now the only one serving the Upper Deeside area. It not only took in patients from a much larger area, including some from Alford and Aberdeen Districts, but also treated a wider range of diseases, such as whooping cough, chicken pox and erysipelas.
The overall number of infectious disease cases continued to drop. A hospital survey published after the Second World War recommended that Aboyne be retained on a care and maintenance basis, for use as an emergency infectious disease hospital, but the need for hospital beds was such that as early as 1946 ordinary medical cases were being admitted to one of the ward blocks at Aboyne. Under the National Health Service (Scotland) Act 1947 (10 & 11 Geo. VI, c.27), Aboyne became part of the NHS and gradually, like many other fever hospitals in the country, found itself being used to provide badly-needed accommodation for the elderly and the chronic sick.
In the second half of the 20th century the hospital underwent various upgrading work, the major change being the addition of a health centre. The initial proposals were put forward in the early 1970s, but were turned down, and it was not until 1979 that building work started. Aboyne Health Centre was officially opened on 20 May 1980. Twenty years later, at the start of the 21st century, the hospital itself had 26 beds and looked after mainly long-stay geriatric patients. |