Nuffield Hospitals, the UK’s largest healthcare charity, is re-branding as Nuffield Health in a move it says reflects its “new vision for healthcare” , and comes in the wake of the biggest programme of change in its 51-year history.
The new entity has also announced a diagnostics partnership with healthcare group Medica which the companies say will create the UK’s largest remote radiology reporting network.
Nuffield Health says it has been repositioning rapidly to offer services that “go far beyond the provision of hospital-based treatment”. The company claims already to be the leading provider of employee health and well-being services and of mobile theatres supporting the NHS, but its acquisition late last year of the Cannons Health & Fitness business represented a distinct move toward more consumer-oriented health services.
David Mobbs, Group CEO, said: “This is about trying to do something different – Nuffield Health offers services that address public health needs and delivers them in a way consumers will find attractive and engaging. Our fitness and well-being services help people improve and maintain their health rather than waiting for problems to occur.”
The re-branding, he said, showed “a renewed focus on individual customers not common in healthcare”, saying: “In the future all healthcare providers will have to engage people on their own terms and treat them like consumers who have choices. Compared to the NHS, we’re relatively small and agile and can implement change.
Meanwhile Nuffield Health Diagnostics, part of Nuffield Health, says the agreement with Medica, which has seen it acquire Medica for an undisclosed sum, can “deliver substantial benefits to the NHS and independent healthcare sector through reduced cost and increased availability of services across all the major modalities”.
Nuffield Health now has access to Medica’s remote reporting technology and Medica an introduction to over 500 experienced consultant radiologists working with Nuffield Health for many years. Nuffield Health Diagnostics is in the middle of a £50 million expansion of its CT, MRI and X-Ray facilities and operates out of over 30 centres nationwide in addition to expanding its fleet of sophisticated mobile units.
Medica has spent nearly five years equipping consultant radiologists so they can acquire and report on scans from home. Between them, the companies claim to work with “almost every NHS acute trust in the country”.
Andrew Allen, CEO of Nuffield Health Diagnostics, said: “It no longer makes sense to have radiologists travelling into hospital, reporting on a couple of films, and then going home. It is far more cost-effective to work from home, producing higher quality reports and delivering the electronic results rapidly to the hospitals.”
