With a focus on prevention, rehabilitation and recovery, we treat the person, not just their condition. We know most people do not want to go to hospital. Our specialist teams and services support them to stay safe and well at home for longer.
You can find us in health clinics, healthy living centres and community hospitals, as well as schools, inpatient units, people’s homes and outreach settings.
We deliver more than 100 NHS community services, ranging from podiatry and chronic pain, to children’s specialist services, end-of-life care, sexual health, community nursing, therapies, rehabilitation and hospital-level treatment at home.
We are building a healthier future for our communities by working with GPs, NHS trusts, councils, social care, mental health services and voluntary organisations. We share information and work towards the same goal: Better, more joined-up care for patients.
Working with the ambulance service, GPs and acute partners, we provide urgent hospital-level care at home for older and frail people, helping to reduce hospital admission, helping more than 2700 people avoid admissions every single month.
We support people to get home faster and safely from hospital, with 86 per cent of patients telling us they feel confident leaving hospital to recover at home with our support.
Together, our services provide 2.8million patient contacts each year.
Our health visiting teams support around families with new baby or a child under five, offering advice and support to give children the best start in life. This year alone they have carried out 250,000 appointments.
When children start school, our school health teams provide health assessments, advice and wellbeing programmes, including vision screening. We also help more than 300,000 school-aged children receive life-saving immunisations each year.
That focus on prevention and early support continues throughout people’s lives. Our neighbourhood teams work across professional and service boundaries to make care easier to access and navigate. We use information to direct support to the communities that need it most and help people stay well for longer.
We’re leading the way in delivering joined-up services in community locations. Thanet Community Health Hub, Edenbridge Memorial Health Centre and the James Williams Healthy Living Centre in Chatham bring general practice, community health and outpatient services together under one roof.
It is not just the care we provide to patients that makes us proud. We are proud of how we support our teams too. More than 6,500 colleagues make up our organisation. They include doctors, community nurses, therapists, dietitians, health visitors, administrators, estates and facilities colleagues and many other healthcare professionals.
We have a highly engaged workforce. Last year, colleague feedback ranked us among the top five trusts in England for compassion and inclusivity. Our people are proud of the care they provide: 90 per cent believe their role makes a difference to patients and eight out of 10 would recommend KCHFT as a place to receive care to a friend or relative.
We are proud of the diversity of #TeamKCHFT and how it represents the people we serve. Seven colleague networks support people who are LGBTQ+, from an armed forces background, Black, Asian or from another ethnic minority, neurodivergent, living with or supporting someone with a disability or long-term condition and those interested in women’s or men’s health.
Our commitment to making sure nobody is left behind has helped increase the number of colleagues who feel supported to declare a long-term condition or disability, rising from below three per cent to 12 per cent.
Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust became a foundation trust on Sunday, 1 March 2015.
In October 2026, we brought together KCHFT and Medway Community Healthcare as one organisation to strengthen community care across Kent and Medway.
Local people and colleagues help oversee KCHFT through our Council of Governors, working alongside our Board of Directors.
Together, they help us find better ways of working and investing our annual £433 million budget to provide and improve services for our communities.
KCHFT was rated Outstanding by the Care Quality Commission in 2019. Following our integration with Medway, this rating remains in place for existing KCHFT services, while newly integrated services retain their current regulatory position until any future CQC assessment of the enlarged organisation.
Check your local healthcare services and hear from our colleagues and patients about how we are making a difference in our communities.
Find out more about us
Help us
There are many ways you can help us. From being a member or volunteering to fundraising for our charity, we want to hear from you. If you are keen to get involved and help us, then this section is for you. Here, you can learn about what it means to us to be a foundation trust and how you can become a member and join in too. You help our charity – i care – get to where it needs to be; providing items that are above and beyond what the NHS can fund. We’d love to hear from you with any ideas for fundraising. Our army of volunteers makes sure our patients get a little bit of extra help while in our care, as do the League of Friends that can be found in many of our community hospitals.
How you can help us
Engaging with our community
We hold regular engagement events in the communities that we serve. You can find out details of these events by contacting us. If you have any questions, would like to read the documents for the events or want to find out more about how you can become involved please email kentchft.engagement@nhs.net.
Working in partnership statement
We work with a range of local and regional organisations to develop and deliver community health and social care services. These organisations include the acute trusts, the clinical commissioning groups and local authorities within Kent and Medway, East Sussex and London.
The trust also works in partnership with its patients, public and other community and voluntary sector groups to make sure that the services it provides are relevant to local people and provided in the best way.