New £37million funding will improve mental health wards in Lincolnshire

Mental health services in Lincolnshire have been given a big boost after being awarded £37million in funding to improve patient environments in Lincoln and Boston.

The Trust has been successful in securing new national funding which will help re-provide three of our adult acute wards into much improved patient environments. This includes two wards based at Peter Hodgkinson Centre in Lincoln and one at Pilgrim Hospital in Boston. The funding will enable the Trust to provide patients with individual en-suite bedrooms and improved access to safe outside spaces when they require hospital care.

All but three of our fourteen inpatient wards currently provide individual bedrooms, with just adult acute wards still using dormitory style accommodation. Dormitories no longer meet the modern standards for mental health care settings and can make it difficult to maintain privacy and dignity.

Mark Platts, Director for Finance and Information at LPFT said:

“We have had a clear ambition for some time to improve our patient environments and remove dormitory accommodation across all of our mental health hospital based services.

“This funding will enable us to begin to deliver our aspirations to meet all the modern standards of mental health inpatient care and provide an outstanding patient experience.

“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 received will enable the Trust to develop two purpose-built wards at Peter Hodgkinson Centre in Lincoln, moving the two existing wards to new ground floor accommodation on the same site. In Boston, the current ward based on the Pilgrim Hospital site will be relocated to a new purpose built centre on the Norton Lea site, redeveloping currently unused land in the town.

Mark continued:

“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 people 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 their views.

“We are incredibly excited to make progress with these improvements and hope to be able to open the new wards in 2023/24.”

There are a number of ways people can get involved and more information is available from our engagement team by emailing lpft.involvement@nhs.net or calling 01529 222245. You can also have your say on our online survey by using this link