Fieldhead Hospital
hospital in West Yorkshire, England

Fieldhead Hospital is a psychiatric and learning disability hospital in Wakefield, United Kingdom. It is managed by South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.
History
The hospital, which replaced earlier hospitals such as Oulton Hall, Hatfield Hall and Cardigan Hospital, was built at a cost of £2 million and opened by Princess Alexandra on 11 July 1972. The hospital was designed as a series of villas, each named after a local area and each intended to accommodate a category of resident i.e. children, adolescents, adults, geriatrics, or severely disabled.
A medium secure unit, known as Newton Lodge, was built in the north east of the hospital site for mentally disordered offenders in the early 1980s.
The hospital started offering a broader range of psychiatric services, after the Stanley Royd Hospital closed in 1995. A patient with paranoid schizophrenia was charged with murdering a fellow-patient at the hospital in December 1998.
The "Unity Centre", a new building with state of the art therapeutic areas, en-suite bathrooms and vastly improved patient relaxation areas, which was built at a cost of £17 million, was opened in September 2017.
Mental Health Museum
The Mental Health Museum (previously known as the Stephen Beaumont Museum of Mental Health) is located at the hospital.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Fieldhead Hospital” as hospital in West Yorkshire, England. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as hospital in West Yorkshire, England. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20047295. Authority coordinates are 53.697, -1.492. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1972, 1995, 1998 and 2017.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fieldhead 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.