Physiotherapy for Elderly at Home in Alton

Alton is one of the few towns of its size with a hospital of its own. Alton Community Hospital on Chawton Park Road, run by Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, provides inpatient beds for frailty, adult rehabilitation and end-of-life care, along with podiatry, tissue viability and community clinics. It has no A&E, no minor injuries unit and no urgent care — though Chawton Park Surgery runs its own minor injury service for its patients on weekdays.

What has changed recently matters. The hospital's rehabilitation beds have been reconfigured from forty across two wards down to thirty on one, with the trust redirecting resource into home-based rehabilitation, urgent community response and virtual wards. That is a defensible clinical position, and in our experience a correct one — most people recover better in their own surroundings than on a ward. It also means ten fewer beds in a town where more than a quarter of households contain nobody under 66.

For anything acute you are travelling. The nearest A&E is Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital, run by Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, around half an hour away up the A339. The nearest urgent treatment centre is at Petersfield Hospital, a similar distance in the opposite direction.

Once you're home, short-term support comes through Hampshire County Council's reablement service — free, including occupational therapists as well as care staff, and capped at six weeks. The difficulty comes when that ends and recovery hasn't finished. Progress after a stroke, a fracture or a long admission often continues for months. We continue the work at home for as long as it's genuinely helping, alongside whatever NHS or council support is already in place rather than in place of it.

Most families who call us here are in one of two situations. Either somebody has come out of the rehabilitation ward and the council's six weeks have run out before they were ready — or a fall has taken their confidence, and the idea of getting to an appointment and back is doing more harm than the appointment would do good.

On paper Alton is well provided for. It has a hospital, three GP practices in the A31 group, a station with trains straight to Waterloo, and the Watercress Line running out towards Alresford. Most households have a car. It is not a hard place to live.

The figure that tells the real story is a quieter one. More than a quarter of Alton households — 26.8 per cent — contain nobody under 66 at all, against 22 per cent nationally. That's a couple in their eighties in a house they've had for forty years, or one person on their own, and no younger person in the building to drive anyone anywhere. Meanwhile the hospital's rehabilitation beds have gone from forty to thirty, with the trust putting the resource into home-based rehab instead. We think that's the right call. It also leaves a gap.

That gap is what we fill: after the ward has discharged you and the reablement team has finished, when there is still real recovery left to do. We come to the house, for as long as it's genuinely helping, and we work around whatever NHS or council support you already have rather than duplicating it.