Hospital Chiefs Explain Bridlington Care Unit Closure Plans

York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is currently evaluating a plan to shut down the Bridlington Care Unit.

Health chiefs have emphasised that the facility was never intended to be a permanent fixture, having been established to ease pressures during the coronavirus pandemic.

The twenty-eight-bed ward originally opened its doors in 2021 to help clear beds at Scarborough Hospital. It was designed to take in individuals who no longer required acute medical attention but were unable to return home immediately due to a lack of available social care support.

Day-to-day medical oversight for these individuals has been handled by general practitioners from Hackness Road Surgery, rather than traditional hospital consultants, reflecting the lower-intensity nature of the care provided.

Chief Operating Officer Claire Hanson explained the original purpose of the site.

Claire Hanson said:

"It opened in 2021 during Covid as a temporary capacity to support discharge from Scarborough Hospital.

Primarily it was for patients that were medically fit for discharge but they were awaiting onward care packages. So they didn't need secondary care hospital intervention but were waiting for support to go to their normal place of residence.

It is not an acute medical, surgical or rehabilitation ward.

Its function aligns much more closely to a care home model. Medical input is provided via GPs and that reflects the step down nature of the unit."

Financial backing from the NHS Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care Board, which helped sustain the project after the pandemic, will cease in the 2026-27 financial year. The trust intends to redirect these funds towards enhancing community-based health services. This move aligns with the broader NHS Ten Year Plan, which aims to shift the focus of recovery away from clinical settings and back into local neighbourhoods.

Claire Hanson said:

"The initial pandemic funding ended and the ICB temporarily supported some costs post pandemic. But that further funding wasn't able to be continued. However it was redirected to strengthen community services and reduce the need for care in hospitals. The decisions was made to work in line with the NHS 10 year plan and move and put more capacity into the support services to enable people to go home to their normal place of residence.

It serves patients from a range of localities. But it can be challenging to find patients that meet the admission criteria due to it being GP led and diverting investment into community means that east riding patients can be discharged home directly without an unnecessary step in their journey. We do find that we have east riding patients that you would think might be able to go to Bridlington care unit but can't because of the care they need. But that can provide, be provided within the community at their home."

Under the current timeline, a consultation process with trade unions and the thirty-one affected employees is already underway, having launched in mid-April. Hospital administrators anticipate that all impacted staff members will be offered alternative roles within the organisation, avoiding any compulsory job losses.

The proposed closure date is set for the first of June 2026. To ensure a smooth and safe transition, the number of active beds has already been scaled back to fifteen, reducing the reliance on temporary agency workers.

Medical professionals have raised significant concerns about the prolonged periods individuals are spending on the ward. Recent figures indicate an average stay of twenty-seven days, with a peak of thirty days recorded earlier this year. The current discharge rate sits at just over two patients per day.

Care Group Director for Medicine, Dr Ed Smith, highlighted the clinical drawbacks of keeping individuals in a clinical environment longer than necessary.

Dr Ed Smith said:

"I characterised it as a care home in a hospital and it's a unit where we provide care but in a hospital setting where we have the downsides of being in hospital associated whether it's deconditioning, that lack of moving patients through the patient journey, with a length of stay of near enough a month for those patients. So that's the reason we want to get patients back into their own home.

I'm an emergency medicine doctor I work in A&E at Scarborough I have done for almost 20 years and we see patients coming back from Bridlington Care Unit on a regular basis because the team there are not equipped to manage those challenges that the patient faces. We don't see the same thing so much from the community patients in care homes etc."

While the majority of those treated at the facility hail from the immediate Bridlington area, data reveals it has operated as a broader regional resource, taking in recovering individuals from as far away as Whitby.

Trust officials have reassured the public that other inpatient services at Bridlington Hospital, including the Kent, Lloyd, and Waters wards, will continue to operate normally and are entirely unaffected by these proposals.

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