Qualla: Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham

Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. Most large hospitals are anonymous. Three cylindrical glass and steel towers rising sixty-three metres above Edgbaston are not. The Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham opened on 16 June 2010 as the first acute hospital built in the city since 1937. Inside its 1,215 beds, surgeons perform more solid organ transplants in a year than any other hospital in Europe. The country's largest single-floor critical care unit, 100 beds spread across one continuous level, runs around the clock. Every British soldier, sailor, and airman wounded in combat zones is flown here for treatment. The hospital exists, in a sense, because Britain still puts its young people in harm's way and has decided to bring them all to one place to mend.

Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham: The Surgeon Who Started It All

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. In 1840, a young Birmingham surgeon named William Sands Cox founded Queens Hospital, a teaching institution chiefly aimed at training local medical students. Birmingham at that point had no medical school. Cox built one. Over the next forty years, the city accumulated a constella...

Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham: Three Glass Cylinders

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. BDP Architects designed the new hospital as three identical sixty-three-metre towers, each nine storeys tall, linked by an entrance atrium and bridges. Balfour Beatty built it under a Private Finance Initiative contract signed in early 2006. The cost was £545 million. A sky bridg...

Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham: The Royal Centre for Defence Medicine

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The hospital is home to the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, opened by the Princess Royal in 2001 and granted its Royal prefix the following year. Every British service member injured in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any subsequent operational theatre passes through its doors. Military...

Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham: Things That Went Wrong

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. No large hospital escapes scandal. In 2013, a nurse was struck off the register after a Nursing and Midwifery Council panel proved more than seventy charges of incompetency. The same year, a consultant surgeon used an argon beam machine to burn his initials onto the livers of ana...

Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham: The Geography of Healing

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elliott Brown, CC BY 2.0. The hospital sits at the southern edge of the University of Birmingham campus, adjacent to the Medical School and Birmingham Women's Hospital. University railway station on the Cross City Line is a five-minute walk from the entrance, and trains run to New Street every few minutes...

Image: Elliott Brown | CC BY 2.0