Reflecting on 125 years of Pinderfields Hospital

On 8 March 1900, Pinderfields Hospital (the original acute hospital in Wakefield was established as part of Stanley Royd Hospital) first opened its doors to military personal during World War One, after which the hospital transitioned into a civilian healthcare facility and was named Wakefield Emergency Hospital. It was in 1940 the hospital was renamed Pinderfields Hospital.

The current Pinderfields Hospital building was opened in 2011. It is the largest of the Trust’s three hospitals. It is the main site for patients who need acute care and provides a range of inpatient, outpatient, diagnostic and maternity services. It is also the busiest of the Trust's three hospitals. In any one year the Trust may have over 127,000 attendances to A&E and over 58,000 emergency admissions. Pinderfields provide more than a quarter of a million outpatient appointments at the hospital across a range of medical and surgical specialties.

Pinderfields is also home to the region’s specialist burns service, which treats patients with burn injuries and skin loss conditions of all levels of complexity from all over Yorkshire, Humberside and North Lincolnshire. It serves a population of five million, as well as taking patients from other regions and sometimes overseas. The unit was the first to be designed and built by the NHS. The new building cost £122,000 in 1965 – around £2.3 million in today’s money. The unit served the population, with a few modifications, for four and a half decades until it moved to the new Pinderfields Hospital in 2011.

The purpose built Regional Spinal Injuries Centre is one of only 11 specialist spinal injuries centres within the UK. Serving a population of approximately seven million across the Yorkshire and Humber region, the unit provides inpatient care for those with a spinal cord injury or non-progressive spinal cord disease, as well as providing life-long support to patients via an established outpatient and outreach service.

In addition, there is The Eye Centre which is a £5 million purpose-built building provides one of the busiest ophthalmology departments in the region.

Richard Robinson, Chief Medical Officer shares his thoughts

A quarter-century at Pinderfields Hospital

For the past 25 years, Pinderfields Hospital has been more than just a workplace for me; it has been a home, a community, and a place where I have grown and developed as a doctor. I started as a junior doctor in the year 2000, a fresh faced 23 year old looking forward to starting a career in medicine. I did not know then how integral Pinderfields would be in my life. Back then, I lived within the hospital walls with 11 other first-year doctors. The hospital was a mix of old Victorian buildings and "temporary" huts connected by a maze of seemingly endless corridors. We walked a lot every day and when the cardiac arrest bleep went off it was a very long way to run from one side to the other.

In those early days, everything was done with paper and pen. We had to find a phone to answer bleeps (pagers) and carry bits of paper across the hospital to request an X-ray or consult with a specialist Consultant. CT scans were rare because we had only one scanner which worked very slowly, it was used only for the most critical cases. One night, the hospital caught fire, and we had to evacuate. That was a night I will never forget.

In 2025 the NHS as a whole and Pinderfields Hospital are very different. We now have multiple CT scanners, MRI scanners, and even surgical robots helping us to diagnose and treat those in need. The hospital has modern digital technology, new buildings and we now have over 1,000 doctors working at the trust.

Today I am the Chief Medical Officer; I look back on the hospital's changes with pride and humility. It is amazing to think that my 25 years here are just a small part of the time the people of Wakefield and surrounding district have been cared for at this site. Looking ahead, I hope Pinderfields will become a University Hospital with a healthcare campus linked to the University of Leeds and other local Universities. A place where we continue to strive to provide excellent care, even when that can be challenging at times, but also a place where research and innovation thrive, creating local jobs, improving lives and making a global impact by helping others learn from what we do well.

As Pinderfields continues to change, I am committed to respecting its legacy while building a future that embraces new technology and treatments to help those that need our help most. But no matter how the hospital changes or what technology we have, it is the people who work here and receive care - some of whom I met 25 years ago - who make Pinderfields what it is. Our staff often share both the worst and the best moments of our patient’s lives. ,

These are my memories, whether patients or colleagues, and they have all taught me along the way. Thank you for that privilege.

- Richard Robinson, Chief Medical Officer

The future of Pinderfields

Mid Yorkshire Teaching NHS Trust's ambition is to become a University Trust. This means leading more research studies and employing more clinicians who also have an academic role. Evidence shows that organisations that do more research achieve better patient outcomes.

The trust are capitalising on its teaching status to deliver more services to Wakefield residents closer to home. As well as hosting the regional spinal injuries service at Pinderfields and the Yorkshire Burns Centre, the trust have ambitions to offer more specialist services on-site in the future. The new MRI suite opening later this year thanks to a successful MY MRI Appeal, will allow children to have scans here rather than travelling to Leeds or Sheffield.

Mid Yorks also provide community services, and aims to expand the range of care offered in patients’ homes and in GP practices and health centres across the district. The opening of the Community Diagnostic Centre (CDC) in Wakefield is a great example of how some services can be moved away from the main Pinderfields site, meaning that the hospital is focussed on the care it can provide while meeting the needs of an ageing population.

The trust also continues to increase efforts with regards to health promotion and prevention, considering how resources to stop patients from becoming ill in the first place can be used, rather than offering a sickness service.

Mid Yorks is committed to supporting the wider community, including offering more jobs to local people, providing volunteering and work experience opportunities, as well as sourcing goods from local businesses to support the local economy, and offering estates and facilities to be used by the wider community.