The original hospital in the area was the Ealing Cottage Hospital which opened at Minton Lodge in Ealing Dene in 1871. This was replaced by the King Edward Memorial Hospital, named in memory of King Edward VII which was opened by Princess Helena in 1911. The hospital joined the National Health Service in 1948 and came under the management of the North West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board. The present Ealing District Hospital was built in the late 1970s and opened 5 November 1979. Occupying part of St. Bernard's Hospital former grounds, the whole complex was renamed Ealing Hospital. At the same time, the King Edward Memorial was closed along with the nearby Hanwell Cottage Hospital in Green Lane and many of the services provided by the Southall-Norwood Hospital on The Green were transferred to the new hospital. The adjacent St. Bernard's Hospital regaining its old identity to provide mental health services once more.
Merger
In October 2014, as part of a drive towards efficiency savings in the NHS, Ealing Hospital NHS Trust merged with The North West London Hospitals NHS Trust. Ealing Hospital underwent a merger process that saw acute services distributed between itself, Northwick Park and St Mark's Hospital, and Central Middlesex Hospital. It is anticipated that there will be a phased removal of acute care services from Ealing Hospital in the medium to long-term, with discussions currently ongoing about the closure of maternity services.
History of maternity unit
The original NHS provision for births was Perivale Maternity Hospital, Greenford. With a total of 67 beds and ten cots in a special care baby unit, Ealing residents 'chose' to have 33.5% of their births here at a rate of 1,800 per annum.. Various working committees agreed that for various reasons it would be better to move the facilities at Perivale to a new maternity unit located on the same site as Ealing General. Thus, on 1 March 1985, a proposal was submitted outlining a number of options together with assessments of relative costs and benefits. The aim was for a 60 beds unit to be able to reach 2,500 deliveries per annum. The new Ealing Maternity Unit opened in March 1988 on the south-west corner of Ealing General.
Quality of care
In 2008 Ealing Hospital Trust was listed last out of the 165 trusts in England in a survey of patients' ratings of the level of care. Director of Nursing Paul Reeves said that the data was collected in August 2007 and the trust was addressing the issues with a series of action plans. In 2008/09 Ealing Hospital did well in a Dr Foster patient safety enquiry achieving a band 4 – better than many other hospitals in the surrounding area. In September 2014, following the closure of nearby Emergency Departments at Central Middlesex and Hammersmith Hospitals, there was a significant increase in pressure on surrounding departments, including at Ealing Hospital, where the percentage of patients being seen under 4 hours fell to 67.8%. An independent review is ongoing about the impact the decision to close these departments has had on emergency care in the North West London area. Care UK runs an urgent care centre on the site which was investigated by ITV's Exposure programme in July 2015.
