Headley Court to serve as a temporary community hospital for Surrey Heartlands

Partners across Surrey are working together to plan and manage our response to the growing coronavirus pandemic. Part of this response has been to develop plans for an additional community-style hospital to deal with increasing patient numbers as this situation develops.

NHS Headley Court Hospital Surrey will now re-open and serve as a temporary community hospital.

Leader of Surrey County Council, and Chair of the Surrey Heartlands Partnership, Tim Oliver said:  “The collaboration demonstrated through this project, and our wider response to the current situation, has been remarkable.  We will get through this together, thanks to the hard work of our frontline workers and the great willingness on the part of all our staff who are doing the most remarkable job in the most challenging conditions.”

With a peak in numbers expected during April, a senior team has been scoping potential solutions in Surrey to provide additional capacity which could relieve pressure on our bigger, acute hospitals and community teams during the weeks and months ahead.

The facility, based in Leatherhead, will provide non-critical care to patients including:

• step-down from acute hospitals
• rehabilitation/convalescence
• those receiving end of life care
• patients who are recovering from Covid-19 who don’t require critical care or acute hospital care

A cross-partner team from across the NHS, Surrey County Council and the military is working hard to get the facility up and running quickly and we anticipate ward areas being ready to receive patients later this month.

Senior Responsible Officer for Surrey Heartlands, Dr Claire Fuller, said:  “I would like to take this opportunity to thank all partners who are involved in getting this facility up and running as quickly as possible.  This represents a fantastic example of the cross-collaboration between public and private sector partners across Surrey, and the willingness of people to work together in the face of an unprecedented public health emergency.”

Next week the multi-agency team will hand over the set-up and running of this facility to Epsom and St Helier Hospitals who will work with partners to ensure that it operational and staffed to support those needing community hospital care.

The Headley Court facility, which previously provided rehabilitation care to military personnel before it closed in September 2017, is already configured with ward space and other clinical areas making it ideal to be quickly converted for use as a community hospital.

Karen Thorburn, who has been leading this part of the project on behalf of the local NHS added:  “We would like to say a particular thank you to Tony Williamson of Angle Property, the current land owner of Headley Court, for his willingness to work with us on this project, without whom this wouldn’t have been possible.”

 

 

Notes to Editor

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1. The Surrey Local Resilience Forum Surrey County Council is the lead agency across Surrey for this response, the LRF is a bit like a local version of COBRA, bringing all local agencies together to deal with a crisis or incident.  We are working in partnership – county council, district and boroughs, police, fire as well as health colleagues – on tackling this crisis and making sure we can protect the NHS and keep our residents as safe as possible.

• Surrey Heartlands is a partnership of health and care organisations working together across most of Surrey – with staff, patients, their carer’s, families and members of the public – to transform local services and support people to live healthier lives. Together we are known as an ‘Integrated Care System’ – partnerships where health organisations, the local authorities and others take a collective responsibility for improving the health of the local population, managing resources (including money) and making sure services are high quality.