Home Physiotherapy & Occupational Therapy in Swanage

Swanage has its own community hospital, and it would be dishonest to open any other way. Swanage Community Hospital on Queens Road, run by Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust, has a minor injuries unit open from 9am to 6pm every day, inpatient beds, X-ray and outpatient physiotherapy. For emergencies and most operations, though, you go further afield — to the district hospitals in Poole, Bournemouth or Dorchester.

So the honest question is: with all of that in place, 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 Poole or 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 — and from Swanage, most journeys are long ones. The road out runs through Corfe Castle and Wareham, the bus to Poole takes more than an hour, and the Sandbanks ferry has its own problems: long queues in summer, and crossings that can be suspended in stormy weather. 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 Dorset HealthCare's Purbeck Integrated Community Rehabilitation Team: 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.

Swanage has its own community hospital, with a minor injuries unit and outpatient physiotherapy. That is fortunate, and it is worth saying first.

But Swanage sits at the end of the Purbeck road. At the 2021 Census, 35.5 per cent of people in the Swanage ward were aged 65 or over — nearly twice the figure for England — and almost one household in five has no car or van. The bus to Poole takes more than an hour, there is no regular train to the main line, and the Sandbanks ferry shortcut brings long summer queues and the occasional storm closure.

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 in Poole or 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.