Inside the ward that poorest children call home

HELEN VESTY VISITS HOSPITAL WHERE TINY BABIES BATTLE THE ODDS AND TEENAGERS SIT GCSES DESPITE MAJOR SURGERY

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PATRICK Arnold has a wobbly tooth. Like any five-year-old, he’s got his fingers shoved in his mouth, desperate to wobble, wobble, wobble.

This tooth is really on its last legs, it’s a front one, a big job for the tooth fairy any day now. And judging by the wide grin on Patrick’s face, he knows it. It’s not just a £1 toll for the fairy to pay up in this case, by the way. Patrick and his cheeky grin get £5.

Looking into Patrick’s wide eyes, you get lost in the world of a little boy. But then you look just a few centimetres to the right, to the left, above. Patrick is surrounded by wires, machines, tubes because he's poorly - very poorly.

He is in ward 77 of the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, on the city centre’s Oxford Road, where some of the country’s sickest youngsters live.

The hospital provides all of the kidney transplants for children in the North West. It’s also one of only two centres in the UK providing the reconstruction and repair for patients whose bladders are born on the outside of their bodies.

Families take flights from as far as Ireland and Scotland to get help here. One former patient even came from Portugal.

Many children with these serious conditions are treated on ward 77. A bustling place, its corridors are filled with medics and nurses from a host of different specialities.

With 32 beds, 77 is one of the biggest wards in the hospital, and there's a near-incomprehensible range of complex cases. Patients on ward 77 can be anywhere from newborns to 17-year-olds.

Tiny babies being treated for near-fatal meningitis, toddlers with bowel failure, teenagers needing appendix surgeries. They can live on the ward for weeks, months, sometimes years.

As the NHS enters its 77th year, the Manchester Evening News got special access to ward 77.