Ventilator Challenge finishes
The UK Ventilator Challenge will finish this weekend having produced 14,000 units to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.
Scientific modelling at the start of the coronavirus crisis predicted that the NHS was going to run out of ventilators, said the UK government on Saturday. This led to the Ventilator Challenge to step up production of existing designs and design new ventilators from scratch.
The government says it received an overwhelming response, with over 5000 companies offering their support and over 7500 members of staff contributing to the effort. However there were companies without medical experience, such as excavator maker JCB, and other that had experience said they had no response to their offers of help: SPEC SAYS TO CALL AN ELECTRONIC ENGINEER TO MEET BATTERY CHALLENGE
The Ventilator Challenge worked to scale up the production of the paraPAC from Smiths, and the Vivo65 and Nippy4+ from Breas Medical in Sweden, and helped guide one newly adapted model, the Penlon ES2, through regulatory approval. The CE approval for this has just been received, allowing the units to be exported to other countries that need ventilators.
Just over 10,000 units from Smiths and Penlon have been delivered, along with 4,000 from existing manufacturer Breas Medical. Over 2,500 have been imported from abroad. A shipment of 150 Vivo65 and Nippy4+ ventilator units arrived from Sweden in May.
Four new designs were assessed as meeting the requirements of the UK’s medical regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. The Dyson/TTP CoVent, the Babcock Zephyr+, the Cambridge Consultants Veloci-Vent and the Swagelok Piran Vent were deemed to have achieved a performance level which met the MHRA’s requirements.
The independent testing organisation (MD-TEC) concluded that they would have all been clinically usable as pandemic ventilators. However these designs were not progressed to mass production as part of the Ventilator Challenge due to reduced demand, said the UK government.
“Designing, manufacturing and testing ventilators usually takes years. So it’s outstanding the progress which has been made in a space of months. Having tested all of these devices, it’s impressive that several new models met the regulator’s requirements,” said Dr Tom Clutton-Brock, Director of the Medical Devices Testing and Evaluation Centre,
“These models would all have been clinically usable as pandemic ventilators and could have supported large numbers of critically ill patients. The NHS now has a readily available supply of devices that will enable the health service to have resilience of supply for possible future pandemics,” he added.
Penlon is now setting up a new line aimed at exporting across the world.
“It has been an amazing and humbling experience for Penlon to be a part of such a nationally important project. There is nothing more purposeful for a UK medical device company than rising to an occasion like this to save thousands of lives,” said Guru Krishnamoorthy, CEO of Penlon.
“Every member of Penlon has put in their best lifetime efforts into this project. We have been supported extremely well by the members and leaders of the Consortium companies, our suppliers and other business partners. We take this opportunity to thank each one of them.”
The last Penlon and Smiths devices will be delivered this weekend, subject to final manufacturing and testing, with the addition of the final Breas devices arriving in the coming weeks.
“I would like to thank my colleagues, our suppliers and the UK Cabinet Office for the extraordinary efforts everyone has made to address the emergency need for ventilators and to support us to ramp up capacity. The ingenuity, commitment, pace and collaboration has been breathtaking and truly inspirational all against the backdrop of such demanding circumstances,” said Raffi Stepanian, CEO of Breas Medical.
There are also around 11,000 non-invasive ventilators and almost 5,000 CPAP machines available to the NHS across the UK which were not available before the start of the crisis. There were also several CPAP designs developed by universities around the UK.
However development of a wide range of wearable monitors and thermal imaging camera technology to detect people with a Covid-19 fever continue strongly.
We continue to cover ventilator developments here:
- ERICSSON, GETINGE PARTNER ON PRODUCTION
- CHALLENGE TO START PRODUCTION OF 10,000 UNITS
- TASK FORCE SEES COVID SUPPLY CHAIN SHIFT
- DYSON PULLS OUT OF UK MEDICAL PRODUCTION
- UK LOOKS TO RAMP PRODUCTION FOR COVID-19
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