Who are Hedena Health?

TonyOX3

It was @HeadingtonNews who first spotted that Bury Knowle Health Centre and three other local practices had taken on a new identity – Hedena Health.

It was picked up and reported on the local e-democracy forum.

In the current climate of creeping (some might say galloping) privatisation of NHS services this rang alarm bells. What was  going on? I  thought I’d try to find out.

A quick search found that Hedena Health is not a registered company, nor a registered charity, and the name is not a registered trademark. Google only seems to know about it as being linked to Silicon Practice, who are credited as the builders of the website.

This ties in with the Hedena Health website itself being registered in May this year by a Dr Steve Treadwell who has an address in Swindon. Dr Treadwell is a director of Silicon Practice. The only other Director (and Company Secretary) is a Jane Oddy.

The Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning group (CCG) publishes a list of practices in Oxford City (see App 2 on p.12). This was last updated in February this year. It shows the practices as “Bury Knowle Health Centre, incl Wood Farm & Marston”. In an email the CCG explained that the new name is recent (June 2017), and they have not yet updated the list. There are some other changes in the pipeline so it will probably be updated in September.

The final part of the picture comes from Bury Knowle Health Centre itself. They tell me that:

We currently have four sites (Bury Knowle, Marston/JR, Barton, and Wood Farm) each of whom until recently had their own telephone number and website. This was causing confusion for patients and staff, and patients were having problem getting through by phone, as our old telephone system was out dated and couldn’t cope with the call volumes. We therefore decided to switch to a single number and website back in June, and to use a unified name for all the sites: Hedena Health. I would like to reassure you though that we remain the same people at the same places, hopefully just providing better access to our patients. There has been no change to the ownership or the management of the Practice and Silicon Practice Ltd are just the company that have provided our website. [quoted with permission.]

It seems then that Hedena Health is an umbrella name that the practices have adopted along with the new software for accessing their services, and no other changes are involved. Someone must have done their research though, for as the Headington website records in its brief history of Headington, “The name “Hedena’s dun” (a dun being a hill) was first used in Saxon times”.