Home Physiotherapy & Occupational Therapy in Ferndown

Ferndown is well served, and it would be dishonest to open any other way. The nearest emergency department is at the Royal Bournemouth Hospital, run by University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust. It moved into the hospital's new BEACH building in 2025 and is open 24 hours a day, and planned hip and knee replacements are carried out there too. For minor injuries, Victoria Hospital in Wimborne has a minor injuries unit open from 8am to 8pm every day, and St Leonards Hospital, run by Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust, provides outpatient physiotherapy and community rehabilitation for Ferndown and the surrounding area.

So the honest question is: with all of that nearby, why would you need us?

Because the hospital is where the operation happens, and home is where the recovery happens. A hip replacement, a knee, a fractured wrist or hip — the surgery takes a morning. The rebuilding takes weeks, and almost all of it happens in your own house. A hospital in Bournemouth does nothing for you at week three, when you still cannot manage your own stairs and the exercise sheet is on the kitchen table.

Outpatient physiotherapy is the other half of it. It exists, and it is good, but it means getting there — out to St Leonards, or into Bournemouth — and parking, on a leg or a hip that is not ready for any of that. Ferndown has no railway station, and the bus to the Royal Bournemouth runs roughly once an hour. For a lot of older people the journey is harder than the treatment, and appointments get missed for exactly that reason.

NHS rehabilitation at home comes through the integrated community rehabilitation teams at Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust: physiotherapists, occupational therapists and rehabilitation nurses, usually for up to six weeks, and through a referral from your GP or another health professional.

Where there is council support, it comes through Dorset Council's reablement service: free, short-term help at home after a hospital stay — often just a few days, and up to four weeks. Its teams can include occupational therapists and physiotherapists. We continue the work after that, or from the start if reablement was never part of the picture, for as long as it's genuinely helping and alongside anything the NHS already has in place.

Your first visit lasts 60 minutes or more, and treatment starts on the day: we talk through your health and what you’re finding hard, agree your goals, look at how you move, and leave you with exercises and a plan.

There’s no set course. About 1 in 4 of our clients need just one visit, and about half need three or fewer.

Ferndown has a 24-hour emergency department a few miles away in Bournemouth, and community hospitals at St Leonards and Wimborne. That is fortunate, and it is worth saying first.

It is also much older than England as a whole. Four in ten people in Ferndown are aged 65 or over — 40.3 per cent against 18.4 per cent for England — and across the Dorset Council area the figure is 29.6 per cent. At the last count, 17.6 per cent of households in the area were one person aged 66 or over, living alone.

That is who a home visit is for. A fall at home, a new hip, a spell in hospital that leaves someone weaker than when they went in — and a family, often living some distance away, trying to arrange help quickly.

And running through all of it is the same point. An emergency department in Bournemouth does nothing for you at week three of a hip replacement, when the exercises are on the kitchen table and nobody has watched you try your own stairs. That is the bit we do.