CANTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec 18, 2025--
Leading private healthcare provider, HCA Healthcare UK (HCA UK), is now live with MEDITECH Expanse across its 11 acute facilities and dozens of outpatient locations, enhancing patient safety and improving workflow efficiencies.
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The innovative, cloud-based EHR provides clinicians across all facilities with a unified, multi-disciplinary health record, giving them a seamless view of the patient's journey and health status whenever and wherever the patient receives care.
“Our primary objective for the Expanse implementation was to establish a single, evidence-based standard of best-practice care across our hospitals and facilities,” says HCA Healthcare UK CEO John Reay. “This new foundation will provide us with the agility to adapt rapidly as medicine evolves, ensuring a high-quality experience for both our patients and our staff, across all locations.”
By standardising on a single MEDITECH Expanse EHR platform, HCA UK has enabled clinical and IT teams across all facilities to collaborate more effectively and leverage their collective expertise. This unified approach reduces the number of disparate applications in use, creating cost efficiencies and delivering a consistent, streamlined user experience.
Since going live, Expanse has further strengthened patient safety through electronic medication management and by giving clinicians a comprehensive, consolidated view of each patient’s history.
The new system is also transforming day-to-day workflows, with mobile access and personalised web-native navigation improving usability and freeing up clinical time. For example, HCA UK nurses can now use smartphones to review care, document activity, and positively identify patients at the point of care, allowing more face-to-face time with patients.
Cliff Bucknall, Chief Medical Officer at HCA UK, adds that, “Clinicians additionally benefit from enhanced accessibility through cloud-based hosting, enabling secure access to patient information from anywhere in the UK and supporting more timely remote care.”
Hosted on the Google Cloud Platform through MEDITECH UK, Expanse delivers the scalability and advanced security needed to support emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. The cloud infrastructure also centralises services and simplifies onboarding for facilities seeking a modern, unified hosting environment.
HCA UK attributes the success of the implementation to the collaborative efforts of all teams involved, including their own team members, MEDITECH’s on-the-ground support staff, and the expertise of CereCore, which provided knowledgeable analysts, project managers, data services, and leadership to support the implementation.
"MEDITECH is proud to continue our 30-year partnership with HCA Healthcare UK, and looks forward to sharing the next chapter of their care transformation journey with Expanse,” says MEDITECH Executive Vice President and COO Helen Waters.
She adds, “HCA UK has long been a forward-thinking organisation committed to leveraging advanced technology for exceptional patient-centred care. We are excited for the many ways Expanse will empower them to utilise the latest advancements, from AI to analytics, to lead the way in providing next-generation treatments and diagnostics."
With a solid foundation in place, HCA UK plans to further leverage MEDITECH solutions and integrated third-party apps to automate processes, boost efficiency, and accelerate care delivery. They also remain dedicated to staying ahead of development opportunities, using their partnership to inform MEDITECH’s roadmap to address top UK healthcare needs.
About HCA Healthcare UK
From complex and urgent care to primary care, outpatient and day-case treatment, HCA Healthcare UK provides expert medical care across our network of hospitals, outpatient centres and NHS partnerships.
HCA Healthcare UK includes London Bridge Hospital, The Princess Grace Hospital, The Portland Hospital, The Harley Street Clinic, The Lister Hospital, The Wellington Hospital, The Harborne Hospital and HCA UK medical centres. HCA UK also partners with leading NHS Trusts to provide care at HCA UK at University College Hospital, The Christie Private Care and Private Care at Guy’s.
About MEDITECH
For over 34 years, MEDITECH systems have been deployed in numerous private healthcare facilities and NHS Trusts throughout the UK, including university, paediatric, women and cancer centre specialty Trusts. We empower healthcare organisations to expand their vision of what’s possible with Expanse, the intelligent EPR platform you can trust. Around the globe, Expanse positions health systems for the next digital era and transforms care with AI-infused solutions, personalised workflows, next-level interoperability, and predictive analytics — all working together to drive better outcomes. Follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, and visit: ehr.meditech.com/global/meditech-uk-ireland.
About CereCore International
CereCore International provides IT services that make it easier for you to focus on supporting hospital operations and transforming healthcare through technology. With a heritage rooted in top-performing hospitals, we serve as leaders and experts in technology, operations, data security, and clinical applications. We partner with clients to become an extension of the team through comprehensive IT and application support, technical professional and managed services, IT advisory services, and EPR consulting, because we know first-hand the power that integrated technology has on patient care and communities.
Executives join the project team to celebrate MEDITECH Expanse live at HCA Healthcare UK. (Credit: HCA Healthcare UK)
LONDON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been damning of the U.K.'s naval capabilities. Their jibes may have stung in a country with a long and proud maritime history, but they do carry some substance.
The U.K. has been at the forefront of Trump’s ire since the onset of the Iran war on Feb. 28, when British Prime Minister Keir Starmer refused to grant the U.S. military access to British bases.
Though that decision has been partly reversed with the decision to permit the U.S. to use the bases, including that of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, for so-called defensive purposes, Trump is adamant he was let down. He has repeatedly lashed out at Starmer and branded the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers as “toys.”
“You don’t even have a navy,” he told Britain's Daily Telegraph in comments published Wednesday. "You’re too old and had aircraft carriers that didn’t work.”
Hegseth, meanwhile, said sarcastically that the “big, bad Royal Navy” should get involved in making the Strait of Hormuz safe for commercial shipping.
For numerous reasons, the Royal Navy is not as big and bad as it used it to be when Britannia ruled the waves. But it's not as feeble as Trump and Hegseth imply and is largely similar with the French navy, which it is often compared with.
“On the negative side, there is a grain of truth, with the Royal Navy being smaller than it has been in hundreds of years,” said professor Kevin Rowlands, editor of the Royal United Services Institute Journal. “On the positive side, the Royal Navy would say that it’s entering its first period of growth since World War II, with more ships set to be built than in decades.”
It’s not that long ago that Britain could muster a task force of 127 ships, including two aircraft carriers, to sail to the south Atlantic after Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands. That 1982 campaign, which then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan was lukewarm about, marked the final hurrah of Britain’s naval pedigree.
Nothing on that scale, or even remotely, could be accomplished now. Since World War II, Britain’s combat-ready fleet has declined substantially, much of it linked to changing military and technological advances and the end of empire. But not all.
The number of vessels in the Royal Navy fleet, including aircraft carriers, destroyers frigates and submarines has fallen from 166 in 1975 to 66 in 2025, according to The Associated Press' analysis of figures from the Ministry of Defense and the House of Commons Library.
Though the Royal Navy has two aircraft carriers at its command, there was a seven-year period in the 2010s when it had none. And the number of destroyers has halved to six while the frigate fleet has been slashed from 60 to just 11.
The Royal Navy faced criticism for the time it took to send the HMS Dragon destroyer to the Middle East after the war with Iran broke out. Though naval officials worked night and day to get it shipshape for a different mission than the one it was readying for, to many it symbolized the extent to which Britain’s military has been gutted since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
For much of the Cold War, Britain was spending between 4% and 8% of its annual national income on its military. After the Cold War, that proportion steadily dropped to a low of 1.9% of GDP in 2018, fuel to Trump's fire.
Like other countries, Britain, largely under the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, sought to use the so-called “peace dividend” following the collapse of the Soviet Union to divert money earmarked for defense to other priorities, such as health and education.
And the austerity measures imposed by the Conservative-led government in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008-9 prevented any pickup in defense spending despite the clear signs of a resurgent Russia, especially after its annexation of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine.
In the wake of Russia's full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and with another Middle East war underway, there's a growing understanding across the political divide that the cuts have gone too far.
Following the Ukraine invasion, the Conservatives started to turn the military spending tide around. Since the Labour Party returned to power in 2024, Starmer is seeking to ramp up British defense spending, partly at the cost of cutting the country's long-vaunted aid spending.
Starmer has promised to raise U.K. defense spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product by 2027, and the updated goal is now for it to rise to 3.5% of GDP by 2035, as part of a NATO agreement pushed by Trump. That, in plain terms, will mean tens of billions pounds more being spent — a lot more kit for the armed forces.
The pressure is on for the government to speed that schedule up. But with the public finances further imperilled by the economic consequences of the Iran war, it's not clear where any additional money will come.
The jibes will likely keep coming even though the critiques are unfair and far from the truth, said RUSI's Rowlands, who was a captain in the Royal Navy.
“We are dealing with an administration that doesn’t do nuance," he said.
This story has been corrected to show there were 166 vessels in 1975, not 466.
An artillery piece from the 1982 Falklands War between Argentina and Britain lies on Mount Longdon on the Falkland Islands, also known as Islas Malvinas, Monday, March 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)
FILE - The Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales is pictured before its port call in Tokyo, Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)
FILE - Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks to Royal Marines onboard the HMS ST Albans in Oslo, during his visit to Norway on Friday, May 9, 2025.(AP Photo/Alastair Grant, Pool, File)
FILE - Indonesian soldiers stand guard as Royal Navy offshore patrol vessel HMS Spey is docked at Tanjung Priok Port during a port visit in Jakarta, Indonesia, Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana, File)
FILE - Crews walk near the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales before its port call in Tokyo Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)
