delivery room

The laboratory has areas kitted out as "real life" working wards, including a delivery room, a neonatal unit and a theatre.

Scenarios that can be simulated include a home birth and a baby being born in a car park, then being moved with its mother to the delivery room, and then to the neonatal intensive care unit.

“My mother, my grandmother actually was in the delivery room with me and they had on like clown suits because they were ready for the party,” Drake said.

A decade later, by the mid-1960s, it was rare for babies to be removed from the delivery room without being individually labelled.

"Instead of holding my wife’s hand in the delivery room, I was crouched on a detention center floor, whispering through a crackling phone line as she labored alone," Khalil wrote.