We are committed to delivering excellent individual care – making a positive difference to people's lives through outstanding personalised care is at the heart of everything we do.
Spire Southampton Hospital is one of the largest independent hospitals on the South Coast. Offering healthcare professionals a facility to refer patients for rapid access to state of the art healthcare.
We pride ourselves on working closely with GPs and healthcare professionals. We offer education events, support primary practice and are constantly listening to make it as easy as possible for you to refer and to ensure your patients receive outstanding personalised care at every visit.
Spire Connect
Spire Connect is the quickest way to make a referral. The patient e-referral portal offers a fast, easy and fully secure way for GPs, practice staff and healthcare professionals to refer patients to Spire hospitals. As well as making secure online referrals for a broad range of treatments and tests and scans, you can also:
Scans and diagnostics
We offer fast access to scans and diagnostics at your convenience.
It's easy to arrange for a scan with us.
The scans and diagnostic facilities at Spire Southampton are open to everyone. You can pay for your own scan or use private medical insurance.
Call our team on 023 8076 4339 or email southamptondiagnosticbookingoffice@spirehealthcare.com if you have any questions or would like to book a scan.
Referrals for NHS patients can be sent through the online e-referral service (formerly choose and book) by visiting www.ebs.ncrs.nhs.uk. This is the best practice for us to receive NHS referrals, as patients will receive appointments in a timely manner and it is an efficient system. This applies to orthopaedic and hernia NHS referrals along with the Tier 3 Weight Management Service.
Referrals for Tier 4 Bariatric Surgery should be sent by email to spire.southamptonnhs@nhs.net. When sending an email, please make sure to state that the referral is NHS and provide a recent, relevant medical history.
Please note, not all our services are available on the NHS. For more information contact our NHS team on 023 8091 4442.
The Weigh Ahead is an award-winning Tier 3 weight management service, provided by Spire Southampton Hospital, for NHS patients referred by their GP.
Referrals are made by GPs through the NHS E-Referral system, under the specialty ‘Health Promotion.’
We want to help you to best support your patient at referral, to ensure they are eligible and ready to start, in addition that we have all the information we need to best support them on our programme.
We also want to let you know the process once they have started and completed the programme and how you can best support them after discharge.
Eligibility criteria ‐ Please attach all required bloods, taken from the last 6 months. Ensure they are all attached to the referral including:
Upon triaging a complete referral, we may contact you regarding any blood test results or medications we think require your attention or consideration – for example, this could be for low vitamin D (common in obese patients) that might need supplementation, or a HbA1c result indicative of diabetes that is not flagged as diagnosed or medicated.
We may also highlight to you any current prescribed medications that are obesogenic, we understand that you may already be aware of this, however, if clinically appropriate, please could you consider reducing, substituting, or stopping these if possible, to support your patient’s weight management.
The patient will be informed near the start of their Tier 3 programme that we have contacted you regarding this medication review, but that our contact is advisory only, and any change to their medication will be made by yourselves not by our service.
The programme is for 6 months – please discuss with your patient whether this level of commitment is possible in their life currently – there will be appointments 1-1 and group sessions at least monthly – the service’s core operating hours are Monday – Friday, 9am – 5pm – will your patient be able to attend appointments within these times?
Some patients are also ‘not ready’ or motivated to make changes, please discuss with your patient their level of motivation to assess whether you think this is the right time for them to get the most out of the programme.
All patients that are accepted onto the programme are initially booked in for a motivational interview call with one of the clinicians. During this call, the programme is fully explained and the patient’s eligibility for onward referral (Tier 4 bariatric surgery) is also explained. We also assess any additional support the patient may need, whether this is a 1-1 pathway, or possibly extra support or an interpreter can be booked if there are language needs. When required, we can also offer F2F appointments from our Western Docks Clinic in Millbrook, Southampton. All patients receive a patient booklet.
Our ongoing nutrition advice, through 1-1 and group sessions, supports patients to make meals more balanced in terms of nutritional content to preserve muscle mass and bone density when losing weight, in addition to aiding satiety (feeling of fullness) working towards 3 nutritionally balanced meals through the day and little need for snacks etc. We don’t put patients on any diets or ask them to follow any strict plans, we work with them to tailor advice and set small achievable goals together.
Activity advice is tailored to what will be sustainable and enjoyable in the long term – we understand the gym is not where most of our patients want to go. We support patients in overcoming barriers to exercise and help them to work on motivation to become more active in their daily routine.
The Behaviour Change part of the programme will help patients to better understand their relationship with food and why they might eat out of boredom, comfort or stress, and how to develop strategies to overcome this. Techniques included, can also help patients to become more mindful when eating and how to navigate cravings and urges to eat outside of meals or when they are not hungry.
During 1-1 and group sessions, patients will also learn about the impact of their environment and upbringing on eating behaviours. An important part of the behaviour change element of the programme is about helping patients to develop self-compassion whilst losing weight – we work holistically, and the focus is on much more than the weight patients lose - we will help patients celebrate all the ‘non-scale victories’ throughout the programme.
Specific types of therapy used are cognitive behavioural therapy and compassion focussed therapy. The Service was awarded recognition for ‘best practice’ in 2018 by the Association for the Study of Obesity (ASO).
Group sessions cover a wide range of topics including:
Towards the end of the 6 month programme, the MDT will review the patient’s progress and discuss onward referral, if appropriate at the patient’s last 1-1 appointment. If the patient has met eligibility, we can directly refer the patient onto a Tier 4 bariatric service provider of their choice, we will inform you of this with a discharge report and that no further action is required. Some patients may need onward referral for further mental health support or referral to an eating disorder service prior to a Tier 4 referral – we will send you a discharge report informing you of this and actions required
We can offer patients a further 6 months of check-ins via PIFU (patient initiated follow up) and this is discussed with the patient at discharge.
If you have any queries regarding patient eligibility, you would like to book an online ‘lunch and learn’ session, or you have any general questions about the programme and how we can best support you and your weight management patients, please contact us on 02380 764 964 or email SPIRE.Tier3Soton-HantsWMS@nhs.net.