About Us
Dorset County Hospital was established in 1991 as part of a long–term project to bring together all the local services for acutely ill patients onto one hospital site. Our hospital, just outside Dorchester town centre, was completed in 1997.
We were awarded Foundation Trust status in June 2007.
Our busy, modern hospital provides a full range of district general services, including an Emergency Department, and links with satellite units in five community hospitals.
We are the main provider of acute hospital services to a population of around 300,000, living within Weymouth and Portland, the west and north of Dorset, and Purbeck. We also provide renal services for patients throughout Dorset and South Somerset; a total population of 850,000.
Our 3,500 members of staff work across various locations, including the main hospital in Dorchester, GP surgeries, schools, residential homes, people’s own homes and in the community hospitals.
Dorset County Hospital has been designed with a major commitment to public art. Find out more on the Arts in Hospital website.
Our values
We agreed our Trust Values as an organisation together, and thanks to the feedback we received, each of our values — Respect, Integrity, Teamwork, Excellence — truly reflect what we all feel is most important.
Underpinning each of our values is a set of behaviours that we all sign up to – The DCH Way – which reflects what we all expect to see in each other and the way that we pledge to behave as we go about our work within the Trust.
We have seen our values becoming part of everything that we do, including recruitment, appraisal, Trust induction and leadership development.
Working together with Dorset HealthCare
In 2022 Dorset County Hospital and Dorset HealthCare took the opportunity to explore the potential benefits of sharing a Chief Executive and Board Chair.
The two Boards agreed to create this new leadership model to help simplify decision-making, increase integration and improve quality and outcomes for the people we serve.
Matthew Bryant joined as Chief Executive of both trusts in April 2023 and David Clayton-Smith as chair in May 2023.
In September 2024 we launched our joint strategy with Dorset HealthCare and we continue to develop our approach to working in a federated way, identifying opportunities to improve outcomes and experience for local communities by collaborating more.