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.
Nuffield Health says it has been repositioning rapidly to offer services that “go far beyond the provision of hospital-based treatment”. It 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 the re-branding showed “a renewed focus on individual customers not common in healthcare”. 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.
Medica says that it has spent nearly five years equipping consultant radiologists to enable them to acquire and report on scans from home.
