Countess of Chester Hospital
hospital in England
The Countess of Chester Hospital is the main NHS hospital for the English city of Chester and the surrounding area. It currently has 625 beds, general medical departments and a 24-hour accident and emergency unit. It is managed by the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, one of the first Foundation Trusts in the UK, formed in 2004. Cardiac rehabilitation services at the hospital are provided by Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.
Lucy Letby, a nurse who worked at the hospital, was convicted in August 2023 of murdering seven babies on the neonatal ward between June 2015 and June 2016.
History
The hospital has its origins in the "Cheshire Lunatic Asylum" which opened on part of the site in 1829. The name of the facility changed to "County Mental Hospital" in 1921, to the "Upton Mental Hospital" on joining the National Health Service in 1948, and then to the "Deva Hospital" in 1950.
By 1948, Chester Royal Infirmary specialized in surgery and out-patients and the City Hospital, Hoole, in chronic illnesses, chest, maternity, paediatric, and general medical cases. Pre-war plans for the expansion of the Infirmary were eventually revived. In 1963 a large out-patient and casualty department was opened at the infirmary; this was accompanied with the completion of the Chester inner ring road in 1967.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5177080. Authority coordinates are 53.209, -2.899. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2004, 2023, 2015 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Countess of Chester Hospital” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.