Home Physiotherapy & Occupational Therapy in Crewkerne & Martock

Crewkerne Community Hospital has half the beds it had this time last year. Somerset NHS Foundation Trust reduced it from sixteen inpatient beds to eight from April 2026, as part of a "test and learn" trial it has also run in Bridgwater, Frome, Glastonbury and Burnham-on-Sea.

To be fair about it, the trust did not simply take the beds away. The freed space is being used for a day unit, ambulatory care, specialist outpatient clinics and echocardiogram scans, so more happens in Crewkerne during the day than used to. But the beds are still eight rather than sixteen, and a day unit is only useful to someone who can get to it.

There is also no urgent care unit in Crewkerne or Martock. Somerset runs seven urgent treatment centres — Frome, Glastonbury, Shepton Mallet, Chard, Bridgwater, Minehead and Yeovil — plus one minor injuries unit at Burnham-on-Sea. Neither of our towns is on that list. The nearest are Chard and Yeovil, both roughly eight to nine miles away, and the nearest A&E is Yeovil District Hospital.

South Petherton is the exception, and it is a real asset. South Petherton Community Hospital has twenty beds, sixteen of which form one of Somerset's two countywide specialist stroke rehabilitation services — the other is at Williton, right over on the far side of the county. It also has an outpatient department and X-ray. People come from across Somerset to do their intensive rehabilitation here — and then they go home, often to a village, where the next stage of recovery is meant to carry on without them. That is precisely where we come in.

Where there is council support it comes through Somerset Council's intermediate care and Discharge to Assess service, part of its Home First approach. It is free, it includes occupational therapists, and it is capped at six weeks. We continue the work after that, or from the start if intermediate care was never part of the picture, for as long as it's genuinely helping and alongside anything the NHS already has in place.

These are old towns in the ordinary sense of the word. Around 28 per cent of Crewkerne and Martock are aged 65 or over, and in South Petherton it is more than a third — against 18.4 per cent for England as a whole. In small towns of a few thousand people, that changes what a fall means and how long a recovery takes.

The health picture here moved this year, and not in the direction anyone wanted. Crewkerne Community Hospital halved its inpatient beds in April. The trust has added day services in the space, which is real and worth having, but a day unit only helps the people who can get to it — and the people we see are usually the ones who cannot.

Neither town has an urgent treatment centre. For anything that will not wait, it is Chard or Yeovil, and for an emergency it is Yeovil. That is eight or nine miles, which is nothing in a car and a very long way on a rural bus timetable with a walking frame.

South Petherton is the bright spot, and it deserves saying. One of Somerset's two specialist stroke rehabilitation wards is there, and it is good. But the pattern is the same as everywhere else: the intensive part happens on the ward, and then you go home to Barrington or Shepton Beauchamp or Lopen, and the rest of the recovery is meant to happen on your own.

So we come to the house. We look at the actual stairs and the actual chair, we work on the things that are stopping you doing what you want to do, and we keep going for as long as it's genuinely helping — alongside whatever NHS or council support you already have, not on top of it.