Home Physiotherapy & Occupational Therapy in Trowbridge

Trowbridge is Wiltshire's county town, but its nearest emergency department is in Bath. The Royal United Hospital at Combe Park, run by Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust, has an emergency department open 24 hours a day. RUH surgeons also carry out planned orthopaedic surgery, including hip and knee replacements, at the Sulis Orthopaedic Centre at Peasedown St John, which opened in May 2025. In the town itself, the minor injuries unit moved in April 2026 to the new Trowbridge Integrated Care Centre, run by HCRG Care Group and open from 8am to 8pm every day, with no appointment needed.

So the question is not whether there is a hospital. It is what happens when you come home from one.

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 Bath 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 an appointment and back, on a leg or a hip that is not ready for any of that. If your surgery was at the RUH, the hospital's own travel advice from Trowbridge is a train to Bath and then a bus. For a lot of older people the journey is harder than the treatment, and appointments get missed for exactly that reason.

NHS community health services across Wiltshire are run by HCRG Care Group under the name BSW Community Health. Some of its services take self-referrals; others need a referral from your GP or another health professional. Worth knowing: until April 2025 these services were run by Wiltshire Health and Care, so you may still see that name on older letters, leaflets and websites.

Where there is council support, it comes through Wiltshire Council's Reablement Service. Its teams include occupational therapists, and it lasts up to 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.

Trowbridge has a minor injuries unit of its own, which is more than many towns have. But its nearest emergency department is in Bath, and planned hip and knee surgery happens at the RUH or at Peasedown St John.

Wiltshire is also older than most. More than one in five people in the county are aged 65 or over, against 18.4 per cent for England, and their numbers grew by 30 per cent between the last two censuses. At the last count, almost 30,000 households in Wiltshire 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.

The villages add to it. Steeple Ashton, Semington and North Bradley are close to the town on a map, but for someone who no longer drives, a hospital appointment in Bath can take most of a day.

And running through all of it is the same point. A hospital in Bath 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.