Coombe Hospital delivers fine website

The Coombe Women’s Hospital is proving a hit on the internet. Rebecca Kelly delivers her verdict

 AS A self-confessed hypochondriac with time on my hands I recently found myself surfing the web for hospitals and other medical places of refuge. 

It was at this point that I discovered the wide and varied selection of Irish hospitals that are now on-line. One of the most widely accessed hospital home pages, with more than 24,000 hits per month, is The Coombe’s Womens Hospital in Dublin’s Liberties. As an original Coombe baby, I decided to trace my origins and check it out. 

The website provides information on all sorts of family planning methods, as well as patient services. It offers advice and fact sheets for pregnant women, and it's slightly unusual latest phenomenon is the ‘Coombe Calculator’, which helps you to estimate the delivery date of the baby! So if you would like to have the first baby of the 21st century, you better book the candlelit dinner and the hotel room for Monday, March 29th 1999, and we’ll leave the rest up to your imagination! 

Using a little bit of mathematical skill, I then discovered I could reverse the calculator and estimate the exact date of my conception! Pointless, but such is the life of an internet junkie. For those of you with lives out there, however, you may be interested to read the latest medical news, learn a little of the hospital’s history or even pass on your comments to the Master of the Coombe via e-mail.

Unfortunately the website provided no diagnosis for my latest ailment. But all was not lost. Surfing the web using one of the many search engines I discovered a site called ‘Guess the disease’, which is a real hypochondriac’s paradise.

The Coombe’s website can be found at www.coombe.ie and for those of you who are not squeamish, try www.handtransplant.org, www.autopsy.com, or www.rotten.com.