Home Physiotherapy & Occupational Therapy in Whiteley

Whiteley has good hospital care within reach, and it would be dishonest to open any other way. The nearest emergency departments are at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham, run by Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust, and Southampton General Hospital, run by University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust. Planned hip and knee replacements may take place at hospitals including the Hampshire Orthopaedic Centre in Winchester, which opened in 2025. For urgent problems that are not emergencies, the urgent treatment centre at Gosport War Memorial Hospital is open from 8am to 10pm every day, and Fareham Community Hospital at Sarisbury provides outpatient physiotherapy and occupational therapy.

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 Cosham 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 — round to Sarisbury, or further afield — and parking, on a leg or a hip that is not ready for any of that. Whiteley has no railway station of its own. 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, 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.

Whiteley has two emergency departments within reach and a community hospital nearby at Sarisbury. That is fortunate, and it is worth saying first.

Whiteley itself is young, but the borough around it is not. The median age in Fareham borough is 47, against 40 for England, the number of residents aged 65 and over grew by 23.4 per cent between the last two censuses, and at the last count 15.1 per cent of households in the borough were one person aged 66 or over, living alone. Many of the people we see in Whiteley are recovering from an operation, an injury or a spell in hospital, whatever their age.

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 Cosham 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.