Leeds General Infirmary

Hospital in West Yorkshire, England

Leeds General Infirmary, also known as the LGI, is a large teaching hospital based in the centre of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, and is part of the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. Its previous name The General Infirmary at Leeds is still sometimes used. The LGI is a specialist centre for a number of services, including the regional Major Trauma Centre and hand transplants. It also provides many general acute services like A&E, intensive care and high dependency units, maternity and state of the art operating theatres. A helipad on the roof of the Jubilee Wing gives direct access to the hospital for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance. Two new hospitals are planned on the site. One will be a maternity unit with capacity to deliver up to 10,500 babies a year. Completion is planned between 2026 2028. It will remove the need to transfer expectant mothers between St James’s Hospital and Leeds General Infirmary.

The first hospital known as Leeds Infirmary was opened in 1771 on what is now the site of the former Yorkshire Bank in Infirmary Street off City Square, Leeds. Notably, the founding five physicians at the infirmary were all graduates of the University of Edinburgh Medical School. Construction of the current hospital on its new site in Great George Street started in 1863 to the designs of Sir George Gilbert Scott. Before drawing up the plans Gilbert Scott and the Infirmary's Chief Physician, Dr Charles Chadwick, visited many of the great contemporary hospitals of Europe. They were particularly impressed by hospitals based on the pavilion plan recommended by Miss Florence Nightingale, and adopted this for the new Infirmary. It featured the latest innovations, with plentiful baths and lavatories throughout, and a system of hydraulic hoists to reduce the labours of attendants and nurses. However, the very high ceilings recommended by Nightingale meant that it could not be adequately heated, and doors to bathrooms were too narrow to admit a wheelchair. The Jubilee Wing, named in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the National Health Service, which provides new Emergency Department services as well as housing regional cardiothoracic and neurosurgery facilities, opened in 1998. It is the main entrance and provides internal links to all other sections. The original plan largely follows the layout of Lariboisière Hospital (1853) in France: Some of the entrance hall is lined with Burmantofts Faience.

The Brotherton Wing on Calverley Street is in Portland Stone, in keeping with the Leeds Civic Hall on the other side of the road. It was the gift of, and named after, Charles Frederick Ratcliffe Brotherton (1882–1949) and opened in 1940. It is both a major expansion in the form of a north extension to the hospital and also provides links between the various buildings, with a new major entrance off Clarendon Way. It has an L shaped plan of seven storeys in red brick and white metal cladding and barrel vaulted roofs. There is a large curved glazed entrance.

The LGI is the designated major trauma centre for adults and children in West Yorkshire and one of the busiest in the UK, being rated in the top three in the country for providing the highest quality specialist care for patients with complex and often life threatening multiple injuries. Cardiac services are also located in the Jubilee wing and include some of the largest services in the country for Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation (TAVI). The LGI has a large and busy Emergency Department for adults, and next to it is a separate dedicated facility for children up of the age of 16, adjacent to the facilities of the Leeds Children's Hospital. The department was featured in the first ever live broadcast from an A&E department as part of prime time ITV documentary, A&E Live. Hosted by Davina McCall, the programme was broadcast live from the LGI Emergency Department for three consecutive nights in celebration of the NHS 70th birthday. The programmes gave an unprecedented insight into the workings of the hospitals and partner services in Leeds. It is the regional tertiary centre for Neurosciences, which includes services for spinal surgery, neurosurgery, neurology, neuro rehabilitation, neurophysiology and stroke. The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust was the first regional stroke centre in the UK to adopt the RapidAI advanced imaging platform across various sites in its stroke network. Professor Simon Kay and his team were the first in the country to perform the first double hand transplants, thanks to pioneering expert care by the teams on the hand and plastics units at Leeds General Infirmary. In 2016, Chris King was the first person in the UK to have a double hand transplant. and in 2018 Tania Jackson became the first woman in the UK to have a double hand transplant. The pathology labs, based in the Old Medical School at LGI, process thousands of samples every day. Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited the pathology services to hear about future plans following an announcement by the Department of Health of £12m additional funding to develop a single Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) across West Yorkshire and Harrogate.