Arrowe Park Hospital

Arrowe Park Hospital is an NHS teaching hospital in Upton, Wirral, Merseyside, north-west England, operated by the Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Trust. With roughly 760 beds, it is the primary acute hospital serving the Wirral peninsula and one of the busier district general hospitals in the north-west. It houses Merseyside's main accident and emergency department and has specialist renal, oncology, and neonatal services.

Arrowe Park has twice served as the UK's quarantine reception centre for infectious disease repatriations. In February 2014, it housed British nationals evacuated from Sierra Leone during the Ebola West Africa epidemic. In January–February 2020, 83 British nationals and 11 non-UK EU citizens evacuated from Wuhan were housed at the hospital's NHS staff accommodation block — a building used during that period as a government-managed quarantine facility because of its isolation from the main hospital wards and good perimeter control. The Wuhan quarantine operation attracted national media attention and set a template for subsequent UK biosecurity repatriation protocols.

The hospital's recurrent role in UK biosecurity repatriations reflects its proximity to Manchester Airport (approximately 30 km), its existing NHS infrastructure, and its historic familiarity with the protocols — a selection logic based partly on institutional memory rather than formal designation as a High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) centre.

In May 2026, Arrowe Park was again activated as a quarantine facility when MV Hondius passengers repatriated to Manchester Airport from Tenerife were transferred there for monitoring following Andes hantavirus exposure. UKHSA coordinated the transfer alongside Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Trust. The activation marked the third time in twelve years that Arrowe Park had served as the primary UK biosecurity holding site for a novel or high-consequence infectious disease repatriation.