Specialist ILD centres in the UK

In England, IPF is diagnosed and antifibrotic medicines are started at a small number of specialist interstitial lung disease (ILD) centres commissioned directly by NHS England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland work differently, through general respiratory services.

No UK centre offers rentosertib.

How the English model works

NHS England treats ILD as a prescribed specialised service under specification 17009/S. A commissioned centre has to have a full set of facilities on site or close by: detailed lung function testing, six-minute walk testing, high-resolution CT, echocardiography, bronchoscopy, surgical biopsy, genetic testing, and access to critical care, radiology, pathology, palliative care and thoracic surgery.

A diagnosis of IPF can only be made by the consensus of a specialist multidisciplinary team, which brings together a respiratory physician, a radiologist, an ILD nurse and a coordinator, with a pathologist and a thoracic surgeon when a biopsy is involved.

Warning

There is no official published list of commissioned centres. NHS England’s own service specification records “Designated Providers: Not applicable”. Independent counts differ: 23 in the ILD-IN service evaluation of December 2023, and 24 in the OneVoiceILD report of April 2024, so the best available figure is “around 23 to 24”. A figure of 13 centres that circulates in some places is wrong: it counts only those that submitted data to the registry. Some listings, including a well-known map produced by a pharmaceutical company, mix commissioned centres with other services.

Centres in England

Region	Centres
North East	Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle
North West	Aintree, Liverpool; Wythenshawe, Manchester (North West Lung Centre); Royal Preston
Yorkshire and the Humber	Leeds; Sheffield; Castle Hill, Hull
East Midlands	Nottingham City; Glenfield, Leicester
West Midlands	Heartlands and Queen Elizabeth, Birmingham; Royal Stoke; New Cross, Wolverhampton; Coventry (listed only on a pharmaceutical company map, so treat as unconfirmed)
East of England	Royal Papworth, Cambridge (around 2,300 patients); Norfolk and Norwich
London	Royal Brompton (the largest ILD service in Europe, more than 4,000 patients); Guy’s; Imperial, at Hammersmith and St Mary’s; UCLH
South East	Churchill, Oxford; Southampton; Portsmouth
South West	Southmead, Bristol; Royal Devon and Exeter

Named service leads are published on each trust’s own website, and posts change frequently.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

Scotland has no commissioned-centre system. ILD services run from the main teaching hospitals, including the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, Glasgow Royal Infirmary (not the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, which is sometimes given in error), Ninewells in Dundee and Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. A national ILD pathway has been described as still in development.

Wales has an ILD multidisciplinary team at University Hospital Llandough in Cardiff, with care shared with district general hospitals. The ILD nurse line at Llandough is 02921 826419.

Northern Ireland runs a Regional ILD Network covering Belfast City, Antrim, Altnagelvin, the Ulster, Craigavon and the South West Acute Hospital. Any respiratory physician in Northern Ireland can prescribe antifibrotics.

Lung transplant centres

There are six lung transplant centres in the UK: Royal Papworth, Wythenshawe, the Freeman in Newcastle (which also serves Scotland), Harefield, Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, and Great Ormond Street for children. The Golden Jubilee National Hospital in Glasgow is a heart transplant centre and does not do lung transplants, which is a common point of confusion.

Capacity and waiting

The picture is of wide and unexplained variation.

The ILD-IN service evaluation, using 2022 data from 22 of 23 centres, found 10,358 new referrals in a year, ranging from 210 to 1,200 per centre. Referrals had risen two to five times since 2017. Time from referral to first appointment ranged from under 5 weeks to 33 weeks depending on the centre, and the average time from referral to starting treatment was 15 weeks. Consultant time dedicated to ILD ranged from 1 to 55 sessions a week. Only 18% of centres had a dedicated allied health professional, and about a third had no pharmacist.

NHS England sets a target of 8 weeks from referral to being seen. In the British Thoracic Society’s 2025 registry data, published in June 2026, only 5 of 22 centres met it, and the average wait from referral to first visit at English prescribing centres was 93 days. The national respiratory audit programme has no ILD workstream, so there is no routine national accountability for these figures.

The UK ILD Registry has closed

The British Thoracic Society’s UK ILD Registry closed at the end of June 2026 after 13 years, having collected data on 12,897 people, 9,485 of them with IPF, across 107 hospitals, and supported 22 publications. Older advice suggesting people ask to join the registry is out of date: it closed in June 2026 and no longer takes new entries.

Finding your nearest centre

Action for Pulmonary Fibrosis maintains a specialist centre finder on its website, which is the most usable public list. Referral is made by your GP or by a general respiratory consultant. If you have been given a diagnosis of IPF without a specialist multidisciplinary team discussion, it is reasonable to ask whether a referral to an ILD centre would be appropriate.