ST Mary's Hospital
St Mary’s Hospital
St. Mary’s Hospital is a District General Hospital with 418 beds and provides medical and nursing services, which includes both general surgery and medicine, and other specialist services in urology, orthopaedics, cardiology, gastroenterology, rheumatology, maternity and paediatrics. All these services are supported by diagnostic imaging, laboratory, ambulance, pharmacy and therapy services, which are all on this site.
There is an Intensive Care Unit, a Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit, a Coronary Care Unit, an Endoscopy Unit and a Chest Investigation Unit.
Visiting mainland consultants provide additional services in Radiotherapy, Neurology, Renal Medicine, Plastic Surgery, Oncology, Genetics, Paediatric Cardiology, Paediatric Surgery and Specialist Endocrinology. The hospital has developed close links with mainland units to provide clinical facilities within these specialities.
Within the hospital is an 11 bedded private wing which has all the benefits of being under the hospital umbrella, with 24 hour medical cover.
Sevenacres, which houses the Mental Health Unit, is also on this site and is the base of the administration and management of the Mental Health and Learning Disability Services. Also based here is the Island Crisis Intervention Services and the Mental Health Assertive Outreach Team. Other parts of this service are delivered from 17 properties across the Island.
In the Community
Health centres and clinics are located throughout the Island and offer a wide variety of community based services. These venues provide a base for health visitors, dental staff, occupational therapists, physiotherapists and speech and language therapists.
Ambulance Service
The Isle of Wight Ambulance Service is unique in its placement within the health organisation. When the government introduced NHS Trust Status in 1991, the Isle of Wight Ambulance Service did not become a trust on its own, unlike the rest of the country’s Ambulance Services. Instead it was incorporated into the Isle of Wight Community Trust, which was created in the third wave of trusts in 1993. In 1997 the Community Trust was merged with the Isle of Wight Acute Trust to become the Isle of Wight NHS Healthcare Trust. As it stands at the moment this is the only Ambulance Service in the British Isles in this position. It is also being studied to identify if this arrangement is effective and can be used as a model for other NHS trusts.
The Isle of Wight Ambulance Service is the smallest Service in the country employing a total of ninety staff consisting of fifty-two Front line Accident and Emergency (A & E) personnel, of which seven are Operational Supervisors. Thirty Patient Transport Services (PTS) personnel including two PTS supervisors, six Clinical Team Managers (CTM’s), an A & E Manager, a PTS Manager, a Training and Communications Manager and a Director of Ambulance Operations. All of these Personnel are uniformed members of staff who are able to provide clinical care to patients in the pre-hospital environment. There are also twelve Control room staff who are responsible for receiving requests for ambulance transport and dispatching suitable vehicles in response. Two administration staff work in the Service headquarters and process the majority of administration work, although a proportion is carried out by the Operational
