What we do

Smiling nurse and patientRoyal Brompton Hospital and Harefield Hospital are part of Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust.

Working from two main sites, Royal Brompton Hospital in Chelsea, West London and Harefield Hospital near Uxbridge, we are the largest specialist heart and lung centre in the UK and among the largest in Europe.

Our experts are known throughout the world for their expertise, standard of care and research success. 

Our specialist hospitals provide treatment for people with heart and lung disease, including rare and complex conditions. We carry out some of the most complicated surgery, and offer some of the most sophisticated treatment that is available anywhere in the world.

Among their many achievements, experts at Royal Brompton Hospital and Harefield Hospital:

  • pioneered intricate heart surgery for newborn infants born with a congenital heart disease
  • performed the first successful heart and lung transplant in Britain
  • implanted the first coronary stent.

Our organisation: facts and figures

  • Patient contacts: 2.6 million
  • Day cases: 132,000
  • Inpatients: 101,000
  • Outpatients: 1.58m
  • Community contacts: 629,000
  • Emergency department attendances (A&E): 194,000
  • Staff: 25,300
  • Annual turnover: £2.8bn

Annual figures for Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, based on 2022/23.

Our research

Research programmes play a vital role at both our hospitals. This is because the most talented medical experts are rarely content with using tried and tested methods to treat their patients.

The opportunity to influence the course of modern medicine by developing new treatments is a prospect that attracts them to specialist centres, where research opportunities are a fundamental part of delivering patient care. Many medical advances made at our hospitals have been taken up across the NHS and beyond.

Each year, between 500 and 600 papers by researchers associated with the hospitals are published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, such as The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine.

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