Nuffield opens 55-bed site in the City of London

Nuffield Health at St Bartholomew’s Hospital opens today, adding 55 inpatient beds to central London’s independent hospital capacity.

The £70m hospital has been built in collaboration with Barts Health NHS Trust, which runs St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and is Nuffield’s first central London site and the first full scale independent hospital in the City of London.

Part of a new health and wellbeing campus, the hospital is split over two buildings and will specialise in cancer care, cardiology, orthopaedics and women’s health. It includes four operating theatres and seven intensive care beds alongside 26 consulting rooms and a range of diagnostic and physiotherapy services.

 St Bartholomew’s Hospital is one of Europe’s leading specialist heart centres and the new site will include innovative cardiac rehabilitation within its cardiac pathway. Patients will be assigned one physiotherapist and one clinical nurse specialist to support them from diagnosis, through treatment and then onto rehabilitation with specialist fitness and dietary support, with the aim of improving their long-term health and preventing a future return to hospital.

Patients will also have access to the recently opened Nuffield Health Fitness & Wellbeing Centre in Barbican, providing prehabilitation and rehabilitation support as well as mental health services such as CBT and counselling.

The opening marks another significant rise in central London’s independent hospital bed capacity. Together with the Cleveland Clinic, which opened its long-awaited 184-bed hospital in Grosvenor Place last month, it boosts the number of independent sector inpatient beds in the capital by around 16%, while ITU capacity has risen by more than 30% on the back of the two openings.

The hospital’s business development director and interim hospital director Jonathan Canham said: ‘Our new hospital – Nuffield Health’s 37th hospital in the UK – complements the internationally-leading cardiac care delivered at the neighbouring St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Our private patients will have access to many leading consultants within cardiac, cancer, orthopaedics, and women’s healthcare.

Nuffield Health CEO Steve Gray added: ‘Opening this new hospital is an exciting milestone for everyone at Nuffield Health and demonstrates our purpose of investing in new, cutting-edge connected health and wellbeing services. Londoners will be able to be referred by a Nuffield Health GP, receive treatment at our new hospital and then choose to receive rehabilitation at our new Barbican Fitness and Wellbeing Centre, which is located nearby the new hospital, or at any one of our 11 medical centres or 35 fitness and wellbeing centres across London and within the M25.’