Hospitals in the Community

Hospitals in the Community

Hospitals in the Community:

The role of a Community Hospital is pivotal to the philosophy of delivery of care closer to home and providing care for patients in the least dependant setting for their care needs.

Each Hospital provides an appropriate range of accessible health care facilities and resources designed to meet the needs of local people. This includes inpatient beds, out-patient clinics, diagnostic facilities, day care services, a Minor injuries Unit and other intermediate care services.

As well as clinical staff including Nurses, Healthcare Support Workers and Therapists, each hospital has in-house support teams of professionally trained staff supplying specialist support services to clinical staff including administration, catering, cleaning, laundry and portering.

The Partnership Trust has five Community Hospitals, with 15 wards between them, all located in the North of the County: Bradwell, Leek, Cheadle, Longton and the Haywood (Burslem).

We also have staff based in the South Division working at Sir Robert Peel (Tamworth) and Samuel Johnston (Lichfield) Community Hospitals, although these two hospitals are owned by Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

Many of the admissions to our hospitals are from the University Hospital of North Staffordshire, but they also take patients directly from home in order to avoid an ‘Acute Hospital’ admission. These hospitals therefore play an important role in the whole health economy inpatient bed provision.

The philosophy of care on all wards is about promoting independence and developing individualised plans of care for patients. There is a multidisciplinary team approach which includes the integration of therapy, medical and social care professionals.

Different patients stay in a Community Hospital for varying lengths of time dependant on their individual needs. However, length of stay is reducing over time as increased provision in community care becomes available and lean discharge planning is put in place.

The complexity of patients and their need for more acute skills is also being accommodated in our Community Hospitals, thus enabling more patients to transfer to us early from 'acute care and also if they become unwell can be maintained in the Community Hospital setting. The workforce within the Community Hospitals has undergone great amounts of training and upskilling to enable this transition to happen and thus gives the teams a greater amount of diversity in their roles.

The Hospitals and their Wards differ in speciality and numbers of beds and can be summarised as follows: