On 22 October 2026 the Pride of Britain stage filled with nineteen of his former patients. They were aged 10 to 43. They walked out to surprise him as he received the Lifetime Achievement Award. Asif Hasan. Born Pakistan, 1956-57. Seventy years old. He moved to UK in 1981. He joined Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital in 1991 as a transplant surgeon. Consultant cardiothoracic surgeon from 1995. For more than three decades he led the paediatric transplant programme and helped make the Freeman one of the largest and most respected centres for children’s heart surgery and transplantation in the world. More than 4,000 open-heart operations. Approximately 3,000 of them as lead surgeon. Around 400 heart transplants. The emergency call-outs and out-of-hours procedures were never counted. He took the cases other hospitals called too risky. Sixteen years ago a teenager’s new heart was beating and her chest would not close. The donor heart was too large. Every other centre had refused the transplant. On the table he invented a way to close her. It worked. The technique, later called the bootlace closure, has since been used for other children whose chests were too small for the available heart. Cecilia Adamou, the girl from that night, was one of the nineteen on the stage. He co-led Newcastle’s bridge-to-transplant programme. Mechanical devices such as the Berlin Heart kept infants and children alive long enough for a donor organ. He trained children’s heart surgeons in the UK and abroad. On leave he travelled to Pakistan with his wife to train local surgeons and operate on complex paediatric cases. He retired earlier this year after thirty years as head of paediatric cardiac surgery at the Freeman. The award was broadcast on ITV on 22 October. Nineteen people walked onto a stage in London because a Pakistani surgeon in Newcastle had refused to call their cases impossible. Asif Hasan. Pakistan Zindabad. 🇵🇰