Hammersmith Hospital

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Hammersmith Hospital is a major teaching hospital in West London. It is associated with the Imperial College medical faculty and is part of the Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. Confusingly the hospital is north of White City adjacent to Wormwood Scrubs, rather than in Hammersmith. Its origins begin in 1902, when the Hammersmith Poor Law Guardians decided to erect a new workhouse and infirmary on a 14-acre site at the north side of Du Cane Road in Hammersmith. The land, adjacent to Wormwood Scrubs Prison, was purchased for £14,500 from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. A temporary corrugated iron building was erected on the site in 1902 to provide care for victims of a smallpox epidemic that had taken place in the winter of 1901-2. The buildings were designed by the firm of Giles, Gough and Trollope. The infirmary occupied the front part of the site with a central administrative building flanked by pavilion ward blocks linked by a single storey corridor running east-west. A laundry, boiler-house and workshops lay at the centre of the site.

In 1916, the patients and inmates were moved to other establishments and the site was taken over by the War Office for use as the Military Orthopaedic Hospital. It was then renamed the Special Surgical Hospital, and in 1919 became the Ministry of Pensions Hospital. In 1926, demands by the Hammersmith Guardians for return of their property finally succeeded and the site became Hammersmith Hospital. By 1930, the infirmary could accommodate 300 patients.

Until 1997 it was the home of the Royal Postgraduate Medical School which then became subsumed into Imperial College, the hospital remaining a major centre of post-graduate medical study. The Medical Research Council (MRC) also has a major presence at Hammersmith Hospital providing a strong foundation for clinical and scientific research.

Hammersmith Hospital is internationally renowned for clinical research. Its clinical reputation was built on the treatment of medical conditions notably of the heart and kidney, and now includes a cancer centre, a new leukaemia wing and the West London Renal Transplant Centre. Specialist surgery is available for liver cancer, kidney transplantation, gynaecological cancer and cardiothoracic procedures

The address is:

Hammersmith Hospital, Du Cane Road, London, W12 0HS. The telephone number is 020 8383 1000.