About us

Female speaking with staffRoyal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust is the largest specialist heart and lung centre in the UK and among the largest in Europe. 

The Trust is a partnership of two specialist hospitals – Royal Brompton in Chelsea, West London, and Harefield, near Uxbridge – which are known throughout the world for their expertise, standard of care and research success.

We are a specialist trust, providing treatment for people with heart and lung disease only. This means our doctors, nurses and other healthcare staff are experts in their chosen field, and many move to our hospitals from other parts of the UK and abroad so that they can develop their skills even further.

We carry out some of the most complicated surgery, and offer some of the most sophisticated treatment that is available anywhere in the world. We treat patients from all over the UK and other countries.

Our fetal cardiologists can perform scans at just 12 weeks, when a baby’s heart valve is just over a millimetre in size, and our clinical teams regularly treat patients well into their 90s.

Over the years our experts have been responsible for several major medical breakthroughs – performing the first successful heart and lung transplant in Britain, implanting the first coronary stent, founding the largest centre for cystic fibrosis in the UK, and pioneering intricate heart surgery for newborn infants.

We are the leading UK provider of respiratory care and a national leader in the specialist areas of paediatric cardiorespiratory care, congenital heart disease and cystic fibrosis. 

Our patients are supported by adult intensive care units at both hospitals and a dedicated paediatric intensive care unit at Royal Brompton. 

During 2016/17 we cared for more than 200,000 patients in our outpatient clinics and nearly 40,000 patients of all ages on our wards.

Our research

Research programmes play a vital role at both our hospitals. Our clinicians work on numerous research projects that bring benefits to patients in the form of new, more effective and efficient treatments for heart and lung disease. Many medical advances made at the Trust have been taken up across the NHS and beyond. Each year between 600 and 700 papers by researchers associated with the Trust are published in peer-reviewed scientific journals such as The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Our main partner is the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College, London, and we run additional research projects with other hospitals and universities in the UK and abroad. 

Collaboration

Our proximity to the specialist cancer hospital, The Royal Marsden, enables the two trusts to jointly run one of the largest lung cancer programmes in the UK. 

Close collaboration with neighbouring Chelsea and Westminster Hospital allows both trusts to provide significantly enhanced services to patients with heart or lung disease. Harefield teams are supported across a range of specialist disciplines by Hillingdon Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

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