Tailor-made facility for PMLD patients

Westwood Care and Support Group, a Yorkshire-headquartered care provider, has recently completed the internal refurbishment and reconfiguration of two two-storey buildings located on the former Huntercombe mental healthcare site at Market Weighton in Yorkshire’s East Riding to provide new purpose-designed units – one for residential, and one for respite care, for patients with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) and complex physical needs. HEJ’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, met up with Lindsey Bratton, the Group’s founder and CEO, Mary-Jane Hoyle, the Registered Manager at the new facility, and Alex Caruso of Alessandro Caruso Architecture (ACA) – the architects on the £350,000 refurbishment scheme – to find out more.

The internal re-design and refurbishment of the two new residential care and respite buildings, named Fossdale House and Langdale House, was completed last December, and they are now awaiting CQC registration to provide full-time residential care in Langdale House, and respite care/day care for people with PMLD in Fossdale House. The thoughtful refurbishment of the buildings, which the Huntercombe Group – which moved out of the much larger, mixed acuity mental healthcare site in June 2015 – had planned to use as ‘step-down’ units, has given them a distinctly non-institutional, domestic feel. 

Mary-Jane Hoyle elaborated: “While one of the key roles of Fossdale House will be providing respite care – giving people the chance to mix and meet with others in a similar situation, and affording they and/or their families and carers a break – a number of residents, or ‘members’, as we call them, may visit for a ‘one-off’ break. Alternatively, they might visit regularly and decide they would like to live here longterm. We thus placed a high priority on making the living and other spaces as nonclinical, homely, and therapeutic as possible.”