Sidhil Brand Guidelines: The Halifax Hospital Bed Maker Born From Siddall & Hilton

A Yorkshire wire business and its hospital-furniture company.

Sidhil is a maker of hospital and care beds in Halifax, West Yorkshire, and its roots lie in a local wire business. Siddall & Hilton, which today makes welded wire mesh for fencing and construction, says it was founded in Brighouse in 1895 as a wire-drawing company. Companies House records show that the company behind the Sidhil brand was incorporated on 29 May 1951 under the name Siddall & Hilton (Hospital Furniture) Limited.

The register traces the changes of name that followed. The hospital-furniture company became Sidhil Care Limited in January 1995 and Sidhil Limited in January 2000, and it has been called Drive DeVilbiss Sidhil Limited since May 2017. It remains an active company, registered under the manufacture of fabricated metal products, and has filed accounts up to the end of 2025.

Sources differ on how far back the bed-making heritage reaches. When Drive DeVilbiss Healthcare announced its purchase of the business in January 2017, it said Sidhil had designed and made healthcare products in the UK for “over 130 years,” a span that would begin before the 1895 date Siddall & Hilton gives for its own founding. Drive Medical’s UK website still speaks of “over 130 years of UK manufacturing heritage.” Sidhil’s chairman at the time of the sale, Peter Siddall, described in the same announcement a company that had grown “from a small, family-run business” into a leading UK maker of healthcare products.

Beds for wards, care homes and homes.

Sidhil’s products run from the hospital ward to the care home and the home. The 2017 announcement described it as a worldwide maker of hospital and long-term care beds, pressure-care products and a range of aids to daily living, supplying the homecare, acute and long-term care markets in the UK and across Europe. It said the work was done at a 105,000-square-foot facility in Halifax, backed by a nationwide network of service centres.

Its ranges carry short, memorable names. The Innov8 family covers acute hospital beds: Drive Medical’s UK website lists the Innov8 iQ, an electrically operated ward bed, and the Innov8 Low, an ultra-low version, and marks both “Made in the UK.” The Bradshaw range, sold by dealers under the Sidhil name, covers nursing-home profiling beds, with bariatric and junior versions, which one dealer describes with an oak finish chosen to suit home decor. The Solite Pro is a profiling bed for community care at home.

Sidhil also took its beds to international trade fairs. In November 2016 the assistive-technology news site AT Today reported that Sidhil, which it called one of the main suppliers of hospital beds and cots to the NHS, would launch its Innovative IQ intensive-care bed at the MEDICA trade fair in Düsseldorf, held from 14 to 17 November that year, on a stand in Hall 14 of the exhibition centre. The report described a backrest made of X-ray translucent polycarbonate with a built-in cassette tray in easy-clean stainless steel, a ruled measure on the bed end, and split side rails, and said the bed had been designed around four principles the company set out, among them clinical needs and ease of use.

How bed makers present themselves.

Hospital bed and patient-handling makers sell to buyers who rarely see the product in a showroom. Purchasing teams, nurses and facilities planners meet it in catalogues, on websites and at trade fairs, so the way these companies present themselves leans heavily on photography, diagrams and film rather than on the object in the hand.

The most common image is the bed in a calm ward: a made-up mattress, soft daylight, a tidy bedside cabinet and very little else in the frame. Cutaway views and close-ups take over in technical literature, showing the frame, the castors, the side rails and the handsets and control panels that staff use every day. Hoists and stand-up aids are usually shown in use, in care homes and bathrooms as well as hospitals, with a carer and a resident in a staged transfer.

Trade fairs are a second stage. Large medical exhibitions such as MEDICA in Düsseldorf and Arab Health in Dubai give makers a stand on which beds, lifts and mattresses can be set out as a working room. Product films extend the same idea, often following a nurse at the bedside through a short routine to show how a control, a rail or a lift is meant to be used.

Behind those images sit long ownership histories. Many of the names in this field began as small workshops or furniture makers and passed through larger medical-technology groups, mergers and listings, so the brand on the bed today often carries decades of earlier companies with it. The guides in this round look at that history alongside the way each maker presents itself.

A Halifax brand inside Drive Medical.

The family business ended its independence in January 2017. Drive DeVilbiss Healthcare Limited, the UK subsidiary of the medical-equipment group Drive DeVilbiss Healthcare of Port Washington, New York, announced that it had acquired Sidhil Group Limited with effect from 6 January 2017; the terms were not disclosed, and the US trade title Mobility Management reported the deal on 12 January. Drive’s chief executive, Harvey P. Diamond, said the purchase would expand the group’s manufacturing in the UK and add manufacturing expertise to its European business, and Richard McGleenan, managing director of the UK subsidiary, pointed to Sidhil’s place in the hospital, long-term care and homecare markets. Peter Siddall said the Sidhil range would gain access to Drive’s global distribution network.

Sidhil did not disappear as a name. Drive Medical’s UK history page says Sidhil “joined the group” in 2017, bringing acute and community care beds alongside UK manufacturing and servicing. Its corporate page lists Sidhil among the group’s brand portfolios, with Drive and DeVilbiss, and names Halifax as one of its UK manufacturing and operational sites, with Tipton. The same history page says that, following an acquisition by Kingswood Capital Management, the group returned to the Drive Medical name in 2026. The old sidhil.com address now forwards to Drive Medical’s UK website, and the group’s UK office is on a business park in Holmfield, Halifax, that still carries the Sidhil name.

For a design guide, Sidhil shows how a regional maker’s name can live on inside a larger group — on bed ranges, in a company register and on a business park. Compare Drive DeVilbiss, the group that bought it, and LINET, another maker of hospital and care beds. For this guide we use a deep teal, Pennine stone, charcoal and a brick red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sidhil’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.