Home Physiotherapy & Occupational Therapy in Portsmouth

Portsmouth is well served, and it would be dishonest to open any other way. Most of our pages are about what a town has lost. Portsmouth has not lost it. Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham, run by Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust, has an emergency department open 24 hours a day, and it carries out hip and knee replacements for the city. St Mary's in Milton has an urgent treatment centre open 8am to 8pm every day. There is no long drive to A&E from Southsea or North End.

So the honest question is: if the hospital is here, 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 shoulder repair, a fracture — the surgery takes a morning. The rebuilding takes weeks, and almost all of it happens in your own house. Having QA a few miles up the road 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 to the hospital — off the island to Cosham, the car park at QA, or a bus, on a leg or a shoulder that is not ready for any of that. For a lot of 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. Worth knowing: that trust was formed on 1 October 2024, and Solent NHS Trust became part of it, so you may still see the old name on letters, leaflets and older websites. It is the same service.

Where there is council support, it comes through the Community Rehab Service, run jointly by Portsmouth City Council and the NHS. It is free, it includes physiotherapists and occupational therapists, and it is capped at six weeks. It also needs a referral from a health or care professional — you cannot ask for it yourself. We continue the work after that, or from the start if the Community Rehab Service was never part of the picture, for as long as it's genuinely helping and alongside anything the NHS already has in place.

Portsmouth is a young city, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Just under 15 per cent of people here are aged 65 or over, against 18.4 per cent for England as a whole. Portsmouth is simply not that kind of place.

But a share is not a number of people. Nearly 31,000 Portsmouth residents were aged 65 or over at the last census, and that number grew by 12 per cent in the ten years before it. The city council expects it to keep rising. Three-quarters of the city's people live on Portsea Island, one of the most densely built places in the country — terraced streets, narrow stairs and upper-floor flats, where one flight of stairs is the difference between managing and not.

The other half of Portsmouth is work. The naval base, the ferry port, the university and the hospital employ thousands of people between them, in jobs that are hard on backs, shoulders and knees. So a great deal of what we do here is musculoskeletal pain, overuse injury, and getting people upright again after surgery.

Which means the people who ring us from Portsmouth are not all arranging care for a parent. Plenty are in their forties or fifties, they have had a shoulder repaired or a disc go, and they want to know how quickly they can get back to work. We see that, and we work around shifts to do it.

And running through both is the same point. Portsmouth has the hospital, and that is genuinely fortunate. But an emergency department a few miles up the road does nothing for you at week three of a knee replacement, when the exercises are on the kitchen table and nobody has watched you try your own stairs. That is the bit we do.