This slightly faded and shabby facade is the main entrance to Harefield Hospital near Uxbridge west of London.

Harefield Hospital was opened in 1937 and is part of the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust. It came to prominence in 1983 when Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub performed the UK’s first heart and lung transplant there. The Trust is the largest specialist heart and lung centre in the UK and among the largest in Europe. The Trust remains at the cutting edge of heart and lung transplants and the development of ‘artificial hearts’. [Source: Wikipedia]

Our relationship with Harefield Hospital started two years ago and we have been returning ever since; first every three months, then every six months and as from today it will be twelve months before we return. Which is GOOD NEWS!

To be at the cutting edge of medical science you imagine a minimalist über modern laboratory like building but Harefield is anything but that, it was opened in 1937 for goodness sake. Since then they have been “managing” in what they’ve got; there are darkn corridors and odd corners everywhere. Turn one way and you are among generators and waste skips, turn the other way and you are in an immaculate purpose built modern facility.

Somehow it all works; wonderfully. Everyone we have ever met there has been staggeringly cheerful and competent at whatever it is that they do and they go out of their way to make your visit and treatment as painless as possible. Harefield Hospital is proof that the NHS may be on its knees but it is the wonderful people in it that makes it work.

Thank you to all of them.

10 January 2014