According to Essex Magazine, a new project bankrolled by the charity arm of Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust is quietly rewriting what discharge looks like for people leaving specialist mental health wards. The funding is keeping former inpatients moving, meeting, and rebuilding the small routines that long-stay hospital care can quietly erode — and it started with a deceptively simple question.
From the ward to the village
The project grew out of what the occupational therapy team began asking service users as they prepared to step out of the hospital: what do you actually want to keep doing? Rather than designing the next chapter for them, the therapists listened. Patients said they wanted to stay active, spend time outdoors, and hold onto the friendships they had made on the ward.
Monthly badminton and pickleball sessions have already taken place at Basildon Sporting Village, with geocaching planned later in the year — an activity the team hopes will layer in problem-solving and socialising alongside the exercise. Behind the scenes, the OTs are running travel training, walking patients through bus routes and timetables so they can show up on their own terms.
Angela Higgins, Senior Occupational Therapist, said: "We asked our service users what they wanted, rather than deciding for them. They told us they wanted to stay active, spend time outdoors and keep connected with people they had met in hospital. Keeping a regular routine and being physically active can have a positive impact on both physical and mental health and these groups help people continue those healthy activities after discharge."
The coffee between two worlds
Alongside the sport, the OTs run a monthly Coffee Group that pulls people currently on the wards into the same room as those who have already moved into the community. For inpatients, the encounter is a glimpse of what life after hospital can look like — finding accommodation, paying bills, learning the small logistics of an unaccompanied day. For those already outside, the group is a way to keep the connections they built on the ward from fraying.
Higgins added: "We've seen people reconnect with peers and become more confident about meeting up independently. One person told me they had really enjoyed a recent group, had lots of fun and had smiled the whole way back to their accommodation. What's particularly special is that these activities have been co-produced with our service users. They told us what they wanted, we've listened, and the charity funding has helped us make it happen."
The groundwork charity funding carries
The sports sessions sit inside a wider EPUT programme that also includes snooker, gardening, and a 'Moving On' group designed to ease the last weeks before discharge. Charitable Funds, the trust notes, back the work the core NHS budget cannot stretch to — the extra mile of transport training, the coffee, the entry fee, the staff time that turns a good idea into a calendar full of ordinary Tuesdays.
It is the kind of grassroots intervention that rarely makes the morning headlines. But on the ground, it shows up in the smallest of ways: a patient finding their own way to a session, a former inpatient waving across a sports hall at someone they last saw on a ward, the quiet resilience of a smile held all the way back to the front door.