Lymington Hospital Friends

Trustees Annual Report to 31/03/26

Achievements and performance

The trustees continue to actively support Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (HIoW), formerly Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, to develop/deliver major new projects, and with Partnering Health Ltd to expand their Urgent Treatment Centre facility. We have also been proactively meeting with University Hospital Southampton (UHS) NHS Foundation Trust to explore potential projects to enhance their range of clinics and operations at Lymington Hospital.

A new national strategic NHS 10-year plan is driving HIoW, UHS and PHL to re-evaluate their service provision and this will have impacts on the development of Lymington Hospital and its community provision. This major change programme, and the restructuring of HIoW (emerging from the merger of Southern Health with other NHS partners), together with structural changes at UHS has postponed further the major new service developments that we had been working to provide in the second half of the current year.

We plan to meet the senior management teams from HIoW, UHS and PHL, starting in April 2026, to establish how they are planning to respond to the new NHS directives. This will enable the charity to identify future projects and funding requirements in collaboration with service providers and hospital managers.

We held our third open evening event in the hospital atrium with over 100 Friends, guests and former patients. Briefings were given by the joint chairs and hospital senior managers, followed by a Q&A, demonstrations of equipment funded by the Friends, and hospital department tours.

Projects

We continue to identify, resource and fund a rolling programme of projects to enhance patient care and increase the capacity of the hospital and its community nurses to deliver care to people locally. This saves patients from the need to travel to a general hospital (principally Southampton) and supports the NHS strategy of serving patients from well equipped ‘Community’ Hospitals, with Diagnostic Centres – Lymington was one of the first Community Diagnostic Centres in the UK, thanks to investment of more than £2m by the Friends in Radiology equipment over the past 10 years.

During the year, we raised an appeal for several projects and won support from local sports, social and community groups, some as their ‘charity of the year’, and from a number of individual donors. We also encouraged matched funding from staff, who carried out personal challenges to enable the Friends to fund new equipment for their departments.

Projects include new mobile handsets for the wards, sensory dementia training for staff, rehab equipment for stroke patients, picture ceiling tiles and bone models for radiology, a new paediatric sensory area, stroke therapy circuits and a ‘zero-gravity’ walking hoist for stroke patients. We have attended several community meetings and a feedback group run by the stroke therapy team.

In February 2025, we funded a major project to instal (and fund, initially for three years, the running costs of) a modern efficient WiFi service for patients and staff and provided a ‘landing page’ on the charity’s website with an opt-in facility to subscribe to our monthly newsletter. This new technology has significantly improved the ability of people to keep in touch with ward and day patients, carers and staff. Additionally it has upgraded the signal for WiFi-enabled hospital services.

During the year, we enhanced our outdoor nature trail and garden facilities to include a ‘wellbeing building’ and added a sensory garden plus additional landscaping (funded by Brighterway charity). During 2026 we will fund a new access door from the rear main corridor to the wellbeing garden facilities. Additionally, we will upgrade the wellbeing trail to a tarmac path, to improve accessibility for patients, especially those using wheelchairs.

The charity has donated over £1.1 million in the last 7 years and approaching £5 million since the League of Friends was formed in 1952.

Trustees

Over the past year we have been taking steps to broaden the number and skills of the charity’s trustees to provide greater bandwidth. We have developed a resilience and a succession plan for the potential retirement of one or both of the current joint chairs during the next year.

A new comprehensive induction programme was introduced to enable trustees to more effectively familiarise with our work and identify workstreams to engage with. Three new trustees joined the charity during the current year, and we continue to have discussions with potential additional trustees to strengthen our resources and provide for retirements. Future needs will be based on a skills audit to achieve an optimum number and blend of trustees to meet the objectives of the charity.

Volunteers

We have been steadily growing the number of volunteers to support ward patients, run the charity shop, help the office manager with the running of the charity office and work on the wellbeing trail/garden area. New volunteers join us from active promotion at volunteer events, in response to marketing of volunteer opportunities in the hospital and articles in our monthly newsletter. We again attended the New Forest Show, supported by hospital staff to promote the hospital services and recruit new friends, it was productive but hard work over three days. We also attended ‘Picnic in the park’ a Lymington community weekend fun day. This was very effective and we will attend only this in the future.

The Ward Friends role, introduced in 2023, has grown in value, and we have recruited and trained more volunteers to support patients on the wards, providing a friendly chat and improve their wellbeing. This has been very well received by patients and the volunteer session on the wards is highly valued by hospital staff. Each volunteer completes a two-hour or three-hour shift on one of the main inpatient wards.

We have also introduced Ward Friends with Pet’s as Therapy (PAT) dogs, and this has proved very popular, cheering up patients who may not get many visitors and generally reducing stress.

Friends

The charity has developed an effective role of hospital ‘Friend’, these are members of the local community who have expressed the wish to keep in touch with the work of LHF. Over the previous 5 years, the number of Friends had grown from 180 to 800, typically as a result of proactive face to face contact in the hospital or at external events.

Since the introduction of the new WiFi system, with an option to subscribe to receive news updates (see above under Projects), we have grown our Friends to over 5,000 (increasing by some 350 every month). We can now send both Friends news and hospital/health updates monthly to a large local audience. The hospital and service providers value access to our ‘news channel’ as their contact with patients is limited by GDPR to specific treatment updates only.