The battle was eventually lost in 1998 and the premises were left standing empty for the next five years before being demolished and the land has since been sold and used for new houses.

St Peter's Hospital for mental patients was established in 1930 at the former workhouse premises in St Peter's Road but when this closed in 1992, the entire complex stood empty for several years before being bought and demolished in 2001 to make way for extensions to the printing plant owned by Warners Midlands plc.

Care in the community, as we know it today, began with the Bourne Nursing Association which was formed to celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and within ten years, nurses were making almost 2,000 visits a year to treat patients in their own homes.

The organisation was left a private house in North Road in the will of a local man and this was turned into the Butterfield Hospital, so named after its benefactor, and opened by the Countess of Ancaster in 1910. The first patient was already being treated, William Thornton, aged five, who had fallen from a bridge in Eastgate breaking his thigh which was set on the kitchen table before being admitted to recover which he did sufficiently to present a bouquet to the countess. William incidentally, lived to be 63 and died in July 1969.

The hospital was enlarged in 1920 and continued in use with 12 beds in three wards and a full range of medical services until 1982 when it was shut down despite public protest but Lincolnshire County Council ensured that it could continue as a centre providing day care, recreation and leisure for senior citizens, and this has been its role since 1985. It is now known as the Butterfield Centre, a charitable company which is self-financing but assisted with grants from local authorities.

Hospital care for Bourne patients is no longer available in the town and is provided at Stamford, Peterborough, Cambridge and elsewhere.

Another hospital existed here during the Great War but with a very different purpose because all of the patients were soldiers who had been badly injured in the trenches. When the request for Bourne to establish this facility came from the War Office in October 1914, the town responded magnificently and within a few months, the Vestry Hall in North Street was turned into a temporary hospital for wounded soldiers returning from the front to convalesce, with additional accommodation at the National School next door.

The facility became officially known as Bourne Military Hospital and hundreds of soldiers who had been injured or gassed in France and Belgium were sent here to recuperate under the care of nurses and doctors from the town who had volunteered to do the work.

By the time the war ended in November 1918, the hospital had forty beds and had cared for almost 950 servicemen during a four year period and the work of the staff was subsequently acknowledged by the British Red Cross Society and the War Office. A plaque on the wall inside the hall once remembered this period and although the building has now been converted into a private home, it still has pride of place in the entrance lobby.