History of the St Vincenz Hospital
In 1850, our hospital was founded by the minister professor Johann Baptist Diehl with money from Anton Busch MD under the name St Vincenz Hospital. Nursing care was performed by two merciful sisters of Saint Vincenz de Paul – and this was the beginning of our hospital's history. The hospital had already been enlarged by a variety of building measures during the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th; however, the permanent lack of room made more profound measures necessary. After the war, a building on the Schafsberg, which should have become a youth centre originally, was bought. Here, in 1950 construction measures were undertaken which laid the grounds for a hospital with 90 to 100 beds. Out of necessity, the clinical medicine was taken out of the city centre and relocated in the new hospital on the Schafsberg.
On 10 October 1950, the Hildegardis-Haus, as the hospital was referred to at first, opened its doors to the public. Unfortunately, the confident hope of reuniting the hospital's departments was not fulfilled for a long time. The separation, however, led to extreme difficulties concerning the organisation of the hospital as well as the treatment of its patients.
During the following years further departments (radiology, orthopaedics, and paediatrics) were established on the Schafsberg. Nevertheless, the lack of beds remained a serious problem. As a result, the administration board in accordance with the Hesse government decided on the construction of a clinical centre on the Schafsberg on 3 December 1957. This hospital was then built in three phases between 1958 and 1972. After the Bettenhaus Ost had been opened, the Hildegardis hospital and the St Vincenz Hospital am Huttig in the city centre were demolished. Now the whole hospital had moved to the Schafsberg.
Today our hospital has got 433 beds in 15 departments. In 1972, it was awarded with the title 'Hessenklinik' by the Hesse minister of social concerns. Today, you will not find the merciful sisters of Saint St Vincenz de Paul in our hospital anymore. However, since 1991 sisters of the Congregation of Sisters of Nazareth from Kerala in South-India work at the St Vincenz Hospital.
We do believe today, looking back on a long tradition of 150 years of commitment to our patients, in the same principals as we did at the beginning: It is the holistic approach to the patient, the combination of nursing care and medical technology which forms the core of our work. Construction and redevelopment measures with a total volume of 151 m German Marks (about € 75 m) may have changed the face of our hospital during the past 50 years; however, since we stuck with our principals, all of them have furthered the well-being of our patients as well as the local economy. In addition, the modern technology has eased the burdens of our nursing staff at least to some extent.
The fusion of the St Vincenz Hospital with the neighbouring St Anna Hospital in Hadamar shows that we are not only open to changes in medical technology, but also to structural reforms. The fusion was a future-oriented decision, necessary for the protection and stabilisation of the regional concept for the provision of medical care. In this connection, modern organisational structures are not only an instrument for quality improvement, but also an essential prerequisite for the successful implantation of structural changes on a larger scale which hospitals have to submit to in the context of the reform of the health care system.
Thus, on 1 July 2001, the Hospital Corporation St Vincenz in Limburg took over the management of both houses. Above all ideas concerning the optimisation and restructuring of our medical services, however, there is still the premise that medicine must start with the patient. In fact, these were the two slogans we used to accompany the fusion: "With heart and technology for the patients", and "For more humaneness and nearness in medicine", both of them being principles for our daily work at the St Vincenz Hospital.
