Every novelist loves a madhouse. We spend hours in the company of imaginary friends ourselves and the research is more fun and easier to fudge than learning about cardiology or neurosurgery. 1. Regeneration by Pat Barker

If you're visiting England or recently moved to England, look up the relevant information about accessing the NHS, as charges may occur. Children below the age of 11 or who have special requirements are seen by appointment only in the paediatrics department at Chase Farm Hospital.All GP practices must provide patients with a blood form when they are requesting or booking a blood appointment. Patients must bring this with them, or we won’t be able to continue the appointment. Current Adult Services

He reluctantly returned to medical school in search of a steady income, but literature remained seductive, and after medical school, Nuila took a year off and “wrote probably the worst novel that anybody’s written”. As a medical resident, he would get up at 4.30am to write for two hours before then enduring grueling shifts as a trainee doctor. More and more Nuila fell in love with the idea of being a doctor, and he began viewing medicine as a way to service his vocation as a writer. “I saw medicine as my stability on this quest to write.” We encourage you to ask questions at your appointment. You and your healthcare professional will work together to make decisions about your care, so before you leave your appointment, make sure you understand: Another novel set in a wartime hospital, winning the Booker the year after Regeneration. Four damaged people find themselves and each other in an Italian villa being used as a field hospital at the end of the second world war. The English patient, László Almásy – who is in fact not English – knows that he is dying. As he sinks and surfaces on morphine, he tells the story of his affair with a married Englishwoman in north Africa. There is no prospect of physical healing, for Almásy nor, by the time the atomic bombs have fallen at the end, for the world, but narrative has belated and secondary consolations of its own. 9. Middlemarch by George Eliot The fictional child of RD Laing and Foucault, a novel in which the asylum is a prison for the punishment of those who have offended social norms without breaking the law. There is nothing redemptive about this hospital, where the authorities represented by "The Combine" use every tactic from lying and manipulation to lobotomy to control patients. 3. Faces in the Water by Janet Frame You and your healthcare professional will agree the type of appointment you're offered, based on your needs and preferences. You’ll get the same quality of care no matter what type of appointment you have.

Our wards

The New QEII Hospital in Welwyn Garden City opened in 2015, replacing the original QEII Hospital which opened in 1963. It provides a range of outpatient clinics and services including blood tests, as well as an urgent treatment centre which is open every day from 8am to 10pm. Some services at the New QEII Hospital are provided by Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust, including children’s therapies. If you are over 16 years old, you can usually say you are ok to have treatment yourself. If you are under 16, or over 16 but not able to do this, your parent or carer can do this for you. We are now welcoming visitors to most areas of our hospitals, butsome areas caring for particularly vulnerable patients may have restrictions in place.