Chain of Hope, the charity Magdi Yacoub set up to operate on children with heart disease abroad, holds its thirtieth Gala Ball at the Natural History Museum on Friday 13 November 2026.
Chain of Hope, the charity Sir Magdi Yacoub set up to operate on children with heart disease, holds its thirtieth Gala Ball on Friday 13 November 2026. The ball takes place at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington.
Yacoub was born in Egypt in 1935. He established the heart transplantation centre at Harefield Hospital in 1980, performed Britain’s first combined heart and lung transplant in 1983, and was knighted in 1992.
When he retired from the health service, he set up Chain of Hope and went on practising paediatric cardiac surgery through it. The charity sends volunteer surgeons and medical teams to developing and war-torn countries.
In those countries a child born with a correctable heart defect may have no cardiac surgeon to turn to. The charity performs those operations and trains local teams to do them on their own.
The last Gala Ball raised over £1.8 million. A committee of four co-chairs and a named membership puts together the 2026 ball.
Yacoub also founded a heart foundation in Egypt in 2008, and the two organisations work the same way.