“We were asked to create a very simple ventilator,” Chris Spicer says. “One that would ventilate a patient who’d been anaesthetised.” The Covid-19 pandemic was about to take hold, and Spicer and his team were being drafted in to help with a national emergency.
Amid the many areas in which Britain was underprepared for the pandemic, one of the main causes for concern was the country’s lack of medical ventilators. With the virus attacking the respiratory systems of those infected, just 8,000 machines existed in hospitals throughout the UK. Bracing itself for the worst healthcare crisis in its history, the NHS estimated that 30,000 ventilators would be needed to cope with the rising number of intensive care patients.
More than 20 companies – including Ford, Rolls-Royce, McLaren and Siemens UK – formed the Ventilator Challenge UK Consortium, set up with the aim of producing medical equipment by using existing technological designs from Smiths Medical and Penlon, with materials and parts in current use in their industries.
“It was a massive challenge,” says Spicer. “We’d never done anything like it before. It’s also a highly emotional project. Everyone has someone in a vulnerable category – my grandmother is 95, lives in a care home, and is currently in hospital [although she’s just tested negative for the virus]. That was a real driver, thinking, if that was your father or your granny in that scenario, how could you make that little bit of a difference?”
The starting point for Spicer, as project manager, was how to problem-solve under pressure and with social distancing in place. “We thought: ‘What’s a new way of thinking? How can we be super-agile in our approach to this?’” he says. “But from Monday when we were contacted, by Friday we had a working prototype. We had set up a fully functioning ventilator that would meet the complete specification.”
Spicer and his team – including Tom Harling, a 25-year-old mechanical engineering graduate who had only been with the company for 18 months – worked with a partner firm that had experience in the medical industry.
“Working in a highly bespoke environment making components for submarines includes critical safety, which lends itself well to ventilators,” Spicer says. “Some of the machine companies we use for submarine parts now make plastic valves for the ventilators. We’ve been using kilometres of plastic to get these valves made, which are critical to the system.”
One of the biggest issues to overcome was the supply chain for parts. “This is a global pandemic,” he says. “And across the globe, the traditional medical supply chain is strained. We’ve been able to develop a completely new supply chain that means we don’t have to be reliant on that strained medical supply chain.
“People have worked around the clock to get it sorted. We’ve had people driving up and down this country and Europe, picking up goods and passing them on to the assembly line to make sure it can be finished. It’s currently day 58, and no one’s had a day off yet. A huge amount of team effort has gone into this. I’m immensely proud of everyone involved.”
Since the work began in March, 3,500 ventilators have been added to the national supply, more than 1,000 of which have come from the consortium – but they’re still a long way off reaching the amended 18,000 target announced by health secretary Matt Hancock on 5 April. However, the day-to-day progress has been streamlined and the project’s ventilator is currently subject to medical testing.
Spicer says: “We’ve been working towards a 100-day target to design, develop and supply 10,000 ventilators, which we’re still on target to do. It will be a challenge, of course it will, but we’ll continue to push forward.
“We all just want to help in any way we can. For me, it’s fantastic to be able to provide some support, to feel like we’re making a small difference to what’s going on at the moment.”
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