£37m to improve patient experience for mental health patients

COLUMN: By Mark Platts, Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust Director of Finance and Information
Peter Hodgkinson Centre extensionPeter Hodgkinson Centre extension
Peter Hodgkinson Centre extension

At Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, we have had an ambition for some time to improve our mental health ward environments and provide all of our patients with individual bedrooms when they require hospital care.

All but three of our 14 inpatient wards now provide individual rooms, with just our adult acute wards in Lincoln and Boston using dormitory accommodation.

Dormitories no longer meet the modern standards for mental health care settings and can make it difficult to maintain privacy and dignity, so it is important that we do all we can to improve our estate and patient and staff experience. Having been awarded £37million in national funding, the Trust will now be able to begin to deliver this aspiration.

Mark PlattsMark Platts
Mark Platts

This is incredibly exciting news for our patients and staff. Patients are only admitted to hospital when they can no longer be supported safely in the community by our mental health teams, and it can be an anxiety provoking time. We want our ward environments to provide a calm and therapeutic space where patients feel safe and our staff can provide the very best support to aid recovery.

The funding will enable us to extend Peter Hodgkinson Centre in Lincoln and move our two existing wards to new ground floor accommodation on the same site. In Boston, we are looking at moving our ward from the Pilgrim Hospital to a new purpose built centre on the Norton Lea site, redeveloping currently unused land in the town.

It is important to us that we design our new wards in collaboration with patients, carers, staff and residents, to ensure it meets their needs. We also want to listen to their ideas to help us understand what else we can do to improve our services.

If you have experience of our adult mental health wards at Peter Hodgkinson Centre or Pilgrim Hospital in the last ten years, we would like to hear your views. There are a number of ways you can get involved. Find out more by contacting our engagement team by emailing [email protected] or calling 01529 222245.

We are incredibly eager to make progress with these improvements as soon as possible and hope to be able to open the new wards in 2023/24.

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