St John’s Therapy Centre is a registered location for St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust community services. Since 2010 the trust has provided a range of community services within the London Borough of Wandsworth from Bridge Lane Health Centre, Doddington Health Centre, Eileen Lecky Clinic, Stormont Health Centre, Tudor Lodge Health Centre, Brocklebank Health Centre, Westmoor Community Clinic, Balham Health Centre, Joan Bicknell Centre and Tooting Health Centre as well as St John’s Therapy Centre. The trust serves a population of approximately 1.3 million across South West London and provides services for older people, adults with long-term conditions, people with learning disabilities, families and children.

Continuing care

Community services aim to provide a service for adults over the age of 16 years with physical health needs, including:

• Diabetes specialist nursing
• Heart failure specialist nursing
• Integrated falls and bone health service
• Intermediate care
• Nutrition and dietetics
• Occupational therapy
• Podiatry (including podiatric surgery)
• Respiratory specialist nursing
• Speech and language therapy
• Tissue viability specialist nursing
• Hemoglobinopathies
• Neuro-rehabilitation
• Wandsworth integrated community equipment service

The service is designed to promote healthier lifestyles, physical, psychological and social wellbeing, and supports and encourages people with disability and long-term conditions to live independent lives. Services work with other healthcare professionals (such as GPs, continence service, Macmillan cancer support team, practice nurses, therapy services, tissue viability nurses) to deliver comprehensive and effective care to clients. Specialist services are available for people with diabetes, epilepsy, neurological conditions, physical ailments, cardiac conditions, and so on.

The trust also has four community wards within the London Borough of Wandsworth. Each of the four wards support current systems and have a GP, social worker, pharmacist, ward clerk and advanced nurse practitioners. Other key staff include community matrons, community (district) nurses and healthcare support workers and therapists. One ward has a mental health nurse on a pilot basis. The four community wards are – Central Wandsworth (Wandle), North Wandsworth (Battersea), West Wandsworth (Roehampton/Putney) and South Wandsworth (Balham/Tooting/Furzedown). The aim of these wards is to proactively manage patients in the community with long-term/chronic conditions to reduce the number of unplanned admissions to secondary care. They provide a rapid response to urgent requests for community services to enable patients to be managed in an acute phase at home, thus avoiding admission to hospital. They are also able to provide assistance in the safe, early discharge of patients from secondary care back into the community.

Community learning disability

The Wandsworth community learning disability team is a specialist multidisciplinary team offering a community service to adults over the age of 18 with a learning disability living in the London Borough of Wandsworth. The overall aim is to improve the physical and mental health and wellbeing for service users. The multidisciplinary team comprises community nursing, dietetics, dysphagia service, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, psychology and speech and language therapy, supported by an administration service and an access and referral management service. They work in close collaboration with learning disability social workers.

The community learning disability team offers a range of assessments and interventions for:

• Communication
• Challenging needs
• Coordination and facilitation of health needs
• Dysphagia (swallowing difficulties)
• Mobility/exercise/postural management
• Physical health issues
• Activities of daily living (such as dressing and bathing)
• Support in hospital/medical appointments
• Significant emotional and relationship difficulties.

Family and children’s services

Services are provided from a number of clinics and include well-baby checks, as well as family planning and Sure Start programmes. The services are well integrated into the local authority and include:

• Health visiting services

• School nursing
• Midwifery clinics
• Children’s continuing care
• Sexual health
• Children’s therapies
• Childhood immunisation
• Child health records
• Homeless, refugee and asylum-seekers service
• Special schools nursing
• Children’s speech and language therapy.

This is the first inspection of St George’s Community Services. Overall, we found that St George’s Community Services were meeting the core questions.