Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham

Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham
University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust
The new Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, March 2011
Location within West Midlands
Geography
Location	Edgbaston, Birmingham, England
Organisation
Care system	NHS England
Affiliated university	University of Birmingham
Services
Emergency department	Yes, and Major Trauma Centre
Beds	1,213
History
Founded	2010 (2010)
Links
Website	www.uhb.nhs.uk
Lists	Hospitals in England

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham is an NHS and military hospital in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham, situated very close to the University of Birmingham. The hospital, which cost £545 million to construct, opened in June 2010, replacing the previous Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Selly Oak Hospital. The Trust employs more than 6,900 staff and provides adult services to more than half a million patients every year.

It is named after Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, who was queen consort and wife of King George VI from 1936 until his death in 1952.

The hospital provides a whole range of services including secondary services for its local population and regional and national services for the people of the West Midlands and beyond. The hospital has the largest solid organ transplantation programme in Europe. It has the largest renal transplant programme in the United Kingdom and it is a national specialist centre for liver, heart and lung transplantation, as well as cancer studies. The hospital has the largest single-floor critical care unit in the world, with 100 beds, and is the home of the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine for military personnel injured in conflict zones. It is also a regional centre for trauma and burns. The hospital is served by University station which is a five-minute walk away.

With over 1,000 beds, QEHB is one of the largest single-site NHS hospitals in the United Kingdom.

A variety of charitable hospitals opened in Birmingham between 1817, when the Orthopaedic Hospital opened, and 1881, when the Skin Hospital served its first patients. One of these, Queens Hospital, established in 1840 by a young local surgeon William Sands Cox, was predominantly for clinical instruction for the medical students of Birmingham. In 1884 these institutions, including Cox's medical school, united as part of Mason College, which later became the University of Birmingham.