Home Physiotherapy & Occupational Therapy in Lymington

Lymington is well served, and it would be dishonest to open any other way. Lymington New Forest Hospital, run by Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, has an urgent treatment centre open from 8am to 9pm every day, rehabilitation wards including one for stroke, a community diagnostic centre and outpatient physiotherapy. For a 24-hour emergency department, the nearest are the Royal Bournemouth Hospital and Southampton General Hospital, each around 15 miles away.

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 or Southampton 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 — up to the hospital, or further afield — and parking, on a leg or a hip that is not ready for any of that. For a lot of older people the journey is harder than the treatment, and appointments get missed for exactly that reason.

Community therapy at home comes through Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, and needs a referral from a health professional. Worth knowing: that trust was formed on 1 October 2024 from Southern Health and Solent NHS Trust, so you may still see either of the old names on letters, leaflets and older websites. It is the same service.

Where there is council support, it comes through Hampshire County Council's Reablement service. 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 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.

Lymington has its own hospital with an urgent treatment centre that stays open into the evening, and rehabilitation wards for people who aren't yet ready to go home. That is fortunate, and it is worth saying first.

It is also much older than England as a whole. Almost one in three people in Lymington are aged 65 or over, against 18.4 per cent for England, and the New Forest's median age rose from 47 to 51 between the last two censuses. At the last count, 17.4 per cent of households in the district 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. A hospital ward, however good, 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.