About us

Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (the Trust) was authorised as a Foundation Trust on 1 April 2004.

We are one of the few hospitals around the country which delivers care, teaching and research. To do well in any one of these domains is an achievement. It is an even greater challenge to excel in all three, but that is our ambition.

In addition to Bradford Royal Infirmary and St Luke’s Hospital, we provide a range of services from community sites at Westbourne Green, Westwood Park, Shipley, Eccleshill, Skipton and the Bradford Macula Centre. We serve a population of around 550,000 people from Bradford and the surrounding area. We have approximately 630 acute beds, employ over 6,750 members of staff, and have more than 500 volunteers supporting our services. In 2022/23 our Trust services delivered 5,068 babies, performed 16,872 operations in theatre and handled 446,204 outpatient appointments. We had 141,064 attendances at our Emergency Department.

We strive for excellence and are committed to learning from, and leading, best practice to make sure we are delivering quality care. We aim to have a workforce representative of the communities we serve so we’re the best place for our patients and our people.

As a teaching hospital, we are at the forefront of education and development in healthcare, and have an excellent reputation for research performance. We are one of the leading centres in conducting applied research in the country, particularly in quality and safety, elderly care and rehabilitation.

The Trust is home to the Bradford Institute for Health Research (BIHR) where researchers have led the development, validation and implementation of the award-winning Bradford Electronic Frailty Index (eFI) which helps calculate an elderly person’s risk of disability, impairment, falls and complications of chronic diseases, as well as their diminishing independence and capability. This is now being used by 98% of all GPs across the country.

During 2022/23 we accelerated development of the way we provide hospital care at home – known as virtual care. We have already won national awards for this in Children’s Services and in Care of the Elderly. We spread the approach right across all our services and created our “Virtual Royal Infirmary”. This is a virtual hospital, without walls, where a patient’s treatment and care can begin and end in their own home with support from our fantastic people every step of the way.

Our new £1.7 million da Vinci Xi robot dedicated to cancer surgery operated on its first patient at Bradford Royal Infirmary. The new machine is used for carrying out minimally-invasive operations on patients with urology, bladder, kidney, and head and neck cancers.

Three state-of-the-art operating theatres were also unveiled after a major refurbishment worth almost £4.5million. These ultramodern, hi-tech spaces form part of a five theatre suite – our Bronte theatres.

Brand new maternity theatres also officially opened at our Women’s and Newborn Unit as part of our drive to provide outstanding care to women.

2022 was a hugely successful year for Trust colleagues who were shortlisted several times and won multiple prestigious awards.