ESTATE REDEVELOPMENT
A new rehabilitation facility like few others
Two ‘state-of-the-art’ new hospital wards have opened at the Western Community Hospital in Southampton, providing specialist rehabilitation care to people living in and around the area. Their opening has seen patients and staff re-located to the new facilities from two ageing rehabilitation wards at the nearby Royal South Hants Hospital, bringing together many of Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust’s rehabilitation services as a centre of excellence. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, recently visited to find out more.
Main contractor, Brymor Group Southern Construction, completed the two 25-bed rehabilitation wards – named Keats and Conan Doyle after two famous literary figures with local links – last September, after a two-year construction programme. The new inpatient rehabilitation wards are on the first and second floors of a highly impressive new three-storey building, the West Wing, at the Western Community Hospital on Southampton’s south-western outskirts, with the currently unoccupied ground floor likely to be used for rehabilitation services in the future. Featuring double the amount of single en suite rooms previously available, and considerably more space, the new wards, and the building that houses them, have been built for Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. The Western Community Hospital already housed two specialist wards for people with complex rehabilitation needs, but with the new wards’ opening – in a new building connected to the existing hospital – all rehabilitation services in Southampton are now co-located to form the ‘re-branded’ South of England Rehabilitation Centre (‘SERC’), ‘a centre of excellence where psychological, neurological, and physical rehabilitation services are available’.
Greatly improved facilities Improved inpatient facilities in the new Keats and Conan Doyle wards include a dedicated and larger gymnasium than at the Royal South Hants Hospital, a central courtyard and terrace giving accessible outside space, and an Assisted Daily Living (ADL) suite – a joined kitchen and bedroom/bathroom designed with features patients would have at home, to help prepare them for leaving hospital. Eleven people made up the last patients to use the
rehabilitation wards at the Royal South Hants, where services had been provided in the old Lower Brambles and Fanshawe wards for almost two decades. The staff and patients from these wards – which the Trust acknowledges were ‘ageing, cramped, and no longer fit for purpose’ – moved to the new wards at the Western Community Hospital last October. When Chris James, senior Estate Maintenance &
Infrastructure manager at the Trust, and Chair of IHEEM’s Southern Branch, first discussed the new rehabilitation facility with me last October, he spoke enthusiastically about the impact it would have on the Trust’s ability to provide high-quality rehabilitation services from a modern, purpose-designed space. To discover more, I met with him, and two of the other personnel who have played a key role
Below left: The topping- out ceremony in late August 2023.
Below: An external view of the completed building.
February 2025 Health Estate Journal 41
All photos used courtesy of Joe Low
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