George Eliot Hospital - UHCW - CV10 to CV13

Patient transport services in Nuneaton

George Eliot on College Street for local care, Coventry or Birmingham for specialist referrals. Named DBS-checked driver, price agreed before travel, wheelchair accessible vehicle available.

What we are, and what we are not

Worth settling before you ring, because it saves everyone a wasted call.

We are

A private hire operator licensed by Coventry City Council. Every journey is pre-booked with a named driver assigned in advance and a price agreed before travel. Drivers are DBS-checked. We hold transport contracts with Warwickshire County Council.

We are not

Hampton Travel is not an ambulance service, and is not CQC-registered non-emergency patient transport. We do not carry stretcher patients and provide no clinical care during the journey. If a passenger needs medical supervision in transit, that is an NHS or private ambulance job and we will tell you so rather than take the booking.

What we cover is the ground in between: a passenger who is medically stable but cannot drive, cannot manage the bus, and should not be left to a taxi app at eight in the morning on the day of an appointment.

George Eliot Hospital

Nuneaton's own acute hospital, on College Street, CV10 7DJ.

George Eliot is its own NHS trust rather than part of UHCW, which matters more than it sounds. Referrals move between George Eliot, UHCW in Coventry and hospitals in Birmingham depending on the specialty, so a Nuneaton patient can easily end up with appointments at two or three different sites in the same course of treatment.

We cover all of them. Tell us the hospital and the department when you book, not just the town, because the drop-off point is not the same and neither is the timing.

The Birmingham referral

Nuneaton sits close enough to the West Midlands boundary that specialist referrals frequently go to Birmingham rather than Coventry: the Queen Elizabeth, Heartlands, or a consultant clinic in Solihull.

Those are the journeys worth pre-booking rather than improvising. They are long enough that a cancelled app booking leaves you with no realistic alternative on the morning, and unfamiliar enough that being dropped at the wrong entrance of a large hospital site costs real time.

Care homes and regular runs

We run care home journeys across Nuneaton and Bedworth on the same standing arrangement we use in Coventry: named contact, agreed pickup windows, consistent drivers, and a logged record of every journey with dates against it.

For a home managing several residents with recurring appointments, that record is the part that matters when someone asks for it.

The wheelchair accessible vehicle

"Wheelchair accessible" is used loosely across the trade. Ask any operator these four questions, including us.

Ramp into the cabin

Side-loading ramp taking a powered or non-folding chair into the vehicle, rather than a folded manual chair in the boot.

Four-point M1 restraint

Anchored to the vehicle floor, to M1 standard. Not straps improvised on the day.

Separate passenger belt

A three-point lap and shoulder belt for the passenger, in addition to the chair restraint.

Trained driver

The driver knows the restraint procedure. You should not be talking them through it at the kerb.

Our vehicle meets all four. It is a single vehicle, so accessible bookings in Nuneaton need more notice than standard ones.

Who does the lifting

If the passenger can move from chair to seat, the driver assists and stows the chair. If they travel in the chair, the driver secures it and helps with the belt.

Drivers do not perform lift transfers. That is the correct position rather than a reluctant one. No insured private hire driver should be manually lifting a passenger, and done badly it injures both people. A lift needs trained mobility staff or a family member present.

This is the single most common problem on the day, so settle it when you book rather than on the driveway. Tell us who is doing the lift if one is needed.

What to tell us when booking

None of it is compulsory. All of it makes the day go better.

Notice: 24 hours for a routine journey, 48 hours for a hospital appointment so the driver can be held to the slot.

Put the transport on a travel account

Built for anyone booking the same journeys over and over: care homes, families managing a course of treatment, and clinics arranging transport on a patient's behalf.

8%

added to top-ups from £2,500. Put in £2,500, get £2,700 of travel.

10%

added to top-ups from £5,000. Put in £5,000, get £5,500 of travel.

12 months

to use the credit. Your own topped-up balance does not expire.

The credit is the obvious part. The reason care homes actually move onto an account is the admin. One balance covers every resident, so there is no card handed to a driver, no petty cash, no staff member paying and claiming it back, and no pile of receipts to match up at the end of the month.

You get a statement showing every journey with the date, the passenger and the destination against it. That is the same record the council asks us for on our contract work, and it is the thing that turns an awkward question into a two-minute answer.

For a family, it works the same way on a smaller scale. If someone is booked in for a course of treatment over several months, you top up once and stop thinking about paying for individual journeys while there are more important things going on.

Every journey still comes off at the price agreed when it was booked. The credit is on top of the balance, not a discount applied to a moving rate.

To be plain about the twelve months, because it is the part people misread: the deadline applies only to the credit we add, not to the money you put in. Your own balance stays on the account until you spend it. If credit is still sitting there after twelve months it drops off, and the cash you deposited is untouched. Journeys draw from the credit first, so in normal use it is spent long before the date matters.

Book, or ask first

Call 0800 061 4661 and describe the journey. If we are not the right service for it we will say so.