Care runs in our family. One of our grandmothers spent her working life in the NHS and in care homes; the other worked in social services. My wife is an NHS nurse. My brother-in-law works in the social care sector. And I went the other way — more than twenty years building software solutions. Which means our kitchen table has hosted a very particular kind of conversation for years: the care side of the family describing what their systems put them through, and the software side quietly wincing.
The stories were always the same, whoever was telling them. A nurse finishing a twelve-hour shift and then starting the paperwork. A care team spending a bank-holiday weekend cross-referencing MAR sheets against daily notes against the incident file to prepare for an inspection — building a paper trail for care that had already been delivered impeccably. The care was never the problem. Proving it was.
So we asked the obvious question: why doesn't the software do this? The answer was that it did — for someone else. The systems quoted to small homes are priced per carer, sold on multi-year contracts, and designed for corporate groups with head offices and IT departments. An independent home gets the same contract with none of the leverage, and support tickets instead of a phone number.
"I don't need more features. I need the round, the handover and the inspection to stop being three separate jobs." — the care side of the family, over the third pot of tea
The first version of Heddfa was built on evenings and weekends, and every screen went back to the family for a verdict — a nurse, two generations of care and social services experience, and no patience whatsoever for software that wastes a shift's time. The best QA team we could ask for. If a screen took more taps than the paper it replaced, it went back. The medication round became a worklist with a finish line because that's how the round actually feels. The handover writes itself because handover written from memory misses things. The audit trail is automatic because nobody remembers to log things at 3am.
Why "Heddfa"
Hedd is the Welsh word for peace, and -fa marks a place — so Heddfa is, near enough, “a place of peace.” That’s what a good home is, for the people who live there and for the families who chose it. We’re a South Wales family, so a Welsh name felt right; and we wanted a name that talks about the home, not the technology.
The deal we've made with ourselves
We stay small enough that you can phone the person who wrote the code. We price so a 15-bed independent never has to choose between technology and staffing — £10 a resident, staff accounts free, forever. And we never charge for the thing the sector runs on: people looking after people.