COPD Community Service

About the service

University Hospital Southampton and Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust work together to form Southampton Integrated Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) Team; a jointly commissioned COPD service for the patients of Southampton.

The team provide supported discharge and admission avoidance support for patients who are regularly admitted to hospital with their COPD.

Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust provides Pulmonary Rehabilitation Pathway and Community COPD clinics for people with complex COPD. People can get support in these clinics from respiratory consultants and specialist respiratory clinicians. 

What we do

Pulmonary Rehabilitation
We provide combined exercise and education classes to patients with specific long-term respiratory conditions. Please note we are only able to accept patients with a diagnosis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Read our leaflet here. 

We run classes twice-weekly for six weeks at venues across Southampton. The exercise portion of our classes consists of a warm-up, muscle strengthening exercises, a stamina section and a cool-down, with the aim of improving your fitness so that you are better able to deal with your breathlessness.

We also  cover various topics to improve knowledge, helping you to have more control over the impact of your lung diagnosis more. We provide you with an education pack with all the topics that you can use for future reference with online resources to guide you too.

We also offer our patients the opportunity to continue onto a transitional exercise programme after they have finished their six-week course with us. Exercise is a prescribed part of the management for people with long term lung conditions and is as important as the medications prescribed for these conditions. We want all our patients to continue exercising after our course to maintain and improve their strength and stamina gains and improve the management of their condition.

Our current locations include:

• Bitterne, Southampton: Bitterne Health Centre, Commercial St, Bitterne Village, Southampton SO18 6BT.
  Tuesdays and Thursdays: 10am - 12pm and 1pm - 3pm
• Milbrook, Southampton: Adelaide Health Centre, William Macleod Way, Southampton, SO16 4HB
  Tuesdays and Fridays at 1pm - 3pm
• Southampton City Centre: Royal South Hants Hospital, Brintons Terrace, Southampton, SO14 0YG
  Mondays and Wednesdays 1pm - 3pm
• Online Sessions: Via Zoom Completed at Home (Please enquire about the possibility of loaning a tablet if needed). Wednesdays, 4.45pm - 6pm, Fridays,10.45am - 12.15pm

We can look at flexible attendance or mix and match with face-to-face classes for those people with care and work commitments.

Community COPD Consultant Clinics
We also run consultant led COPD clinics in the community. If your GP feels you would benefit from support from a specialist COPD Clinician in the community, they can refer you into our Community COPD Consultant Clinic. This may allow you to have your appointments in clinics closer to home and outside of the hospital environment, however if you need certain scans or investigations you may have to attend clinics at the hospital in Southampton initially.

You will need to have a confirmed diagnosis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) to be considered for our service and be registered at a Southampton GP Surgery. A GP must complete a referral form. Clinc loca

• Bitterne, Southampton: Bitterne Health Centre, Commercial St, Bitterne Village, Southampton SO18 6BT
• Milbrook, Southampton: Adelaide Health Centre, William Macleod Way, Southampton, SO16 4HB
• Southampton City Centre: Royal South Hants Hospital, Brintons Terrace, Southampton, SO14 0YG.

Accessing the service

To access the service, your GP/Practice Nurse or Pharmacist will need to complete a referral form and refer you if they think you are suitable for the programme.

There are specific inclusion and exclusion criteria for each service, these are listed in the referral forms.

Click here for the Pulmonary Rehabilitation referral form.

Click here for the COPD Community Consultant referral form