On the western outskirts of Leicester, close to the village of Glenfield, sits one of England’s most significant hospitals for cardiac and respiratory medicine. Formally called Glenfield General Hospital, it operates under the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust and holds an international reputation in medical research relating to heart and lung conditions. It functions as a tertiary referral university teaching hospital, meaning patients are often transferred there from elsewhere in the country for specialist treatment that is unavailable at their local hospital.
Construction and Opening
The hospital was built in stages. The first phase was completed in October 1984, with a formal opening ceremony performed by the Duchess of Kent in March 1986. A second phase followed in 1989, expanding the hospital’s capacity. In December 2017, the hospital made national news when surgeons successfully treated a baby girl who had been born with her heart and part of her stomach growing outside her body. The procedure required three separate operations and involved a team of fifty medical staff. The child is believed to be the first baby in the United Kingdom to survive what is described as an extremely rare condition.
The East Midlands Congenital Heart Centre
The hospital was home to the East Midlands Congenital Heart Centre, which served around five million people and treated approximately 230 children and 70 adults each year. The centre held the largest ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) unit in the UK and had been operating for two decades before plans to close it were announced in July 2012. A public petition attracted 100,000 signatures in opposition. Kenneth Palmer, an ECMO expert at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, wrote to the then Health Secretary warning that relocating services to Birmingham could result in around 50 preventable deaths among babies and children over a five-year period, noting that Leicester and Stockholm were achieving survival rates 10 to 20 per cent above those recorded elsewhere. In August 2012, the hospital performed the world’s first percutaneous coronary intervention on a two-year-old child born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a condition affecting the left side of the heart. Legal challenges by campaigners in Leeds led to the closure plans being suspended in June 2013. In July 2015, NHS England announced that following a further review, the paediatric heart unit would transfer to a new unit at the Leicester Royal Infirmary, employing four surgeons and taking on additional cases from April 2016.