The first hospital on the site was established in the First World War for the treatment of injured Australians and New Zealanders. Today, the hospital's state-of-the-art ANZAC Centre remembers the vital contribution made by those troops.
In the 1930s Harefield became an isolation hospital for tuberculosis patients, laying down the foundations of its expertise in lung conditions. In the late 1940s the hospital became part of the new National Health Service and began to develop its expertise in heart conditions in addition to its established lung expertise.
The groundbreaking work of Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub set the direction of the hospital throughout the last decades of the 20th century. He performed Harefield’s first heart transplant in 1980 and carried out the world’s first combined heart and lung transplant at the hospital in 1983. Read about the transplant on the BBC website.
More than 2,500 transplant operations have now been carried out at Harefield and the transplant population includes more than 1,200 patients needing life-long follow up.
