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Manufacturing sector
How the UK plans to source 30,000 ventilators for the NHS
New designs, scaling up of existing production and imports in progress to treat Covid-19
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Rob Davies
@ByRobDavies
Thu 26 Mar 2020 17.36 GMT Last modified on Thu 26 Mar 2020 19.40 GMT
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Medical ventilators are constructed at the OES medical supply company in Witney,
Medical ventilators are constructed at the OES medical supply company in Witney. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA
The government is pursuing a three-pronged strategy to source 30,000 ventilators for the NHS to treat Covid-19 patients, ordering newly designed models, scaling up production of existing ones and importing machines from overseas.
The defence firm Babcock joined the engineering company Dyson on Thursday in revealing plans for an entirely new medical ventilator working to specifications set by the government.
A consortium called Ventilator Challenge UK, involving companies including Airbus, Rolls-Royce and Ford, is separately providing the manufacturing muscle to scale up production of proven models already made by the specialist UK firms Smiths and Penlon.
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A small firm called Inspiration Healthcare has received a £4m order from the NHS for which it will import hundreds of the devices – used to keep patients with respiratory problems breathing – from the US and Israel.
Late on Thursday, the government said it would also join an EU scheme to procure ventilators, having initially said it would not take part because it had missed an invitation to do so owing to a “communication problem”.
A Westminster source said it made sense for the government to pursue multiple strategies in parallel to mitigate the risk of any one option failing.
The firms involved are waiting for the government to go public with its plans but the delay in announcing them is not thought to be holding up the production effort.
Dyson has revealed the most detail about its progress, including pictures of its CoVent prototype. It hopes to begin producing within weeks, pending approval from the Medical and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which has been talking to Dyson during the design phase.
Sir James Dyson.
Sir James Dyson. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
However, the government has placed firm orders for 10,000 of the Dyson machines, which will be made at the company’s lab in Hullavington, Wiltshire, a former wartime RAF base, and supplied at cost price.
The company’s founder, Sir James Dyson, has said he will pay for the provision of a further 5,000 machines out of his own pocket, with 1,000 reserved for the NHS and the remainder available to underpin international healthcare efforts.
Babcock is working on a new model in partnership with a leading medical equipment manufacturer that has asked not to be identified but that has experience making hospital ventilators.
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Jon Hall, the managing director of technology for Babcock, said: “This is a critical time for the country as a whole and for the NHS in particular. When the opportunity arose for us to get involved in helping the NHS to save lives, we knew it was the right thing to do. Combining our engineering expertise with advances in medical technology has resulted in a solution that will help the NHS save lives.”
The supply chain will come from factories in Scotland and south-west England.
Dyson and Babcock both expect it to take a couple of weeks before they reach production, meaning the government faces a race against time to produce enough machines to deal with an anticipated surge in patients.
But Ventilator Challenge UK, bristling with the UK’s best-known industrial names, is thought to be ready to move faster because it is working from existing models.
The group is headed by Dick Elsy, of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult research group, coordinating efforts from Airbus, Meggitt, GKN, McLaren, BAE Systems, Ford, Inspiration Healthcare, Renishaw, Rolls-Royce, Siemens, Thales and Ultra Electronics.
These firms will help massively scale up production lines for Smiths, which already produces a lightweight portable “paraPac” ventilator, and Penlon, which makes a more heavy-duty machine suited for hospital use.
Ventilator experts said smaller models typically cost about £5,000 to make, while the larger devices could sell for £25,000.
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All of the companies involved are expected to waive any profits, given the national crisis, and the supply chain will come entirely from the UK, in case of any disruption to cross-border trade.
In the meantime, the government has also ordered ventilators from overseas to ensure that it can bridge the gap until the other working groups can get up and running.
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Inspiration Healthcare, based in Crawley, West Sussex, said it had taken a £4m order from the NHS and was importing ventilators from suppliers in the US and Israel.
It typically ships medical equipment to the UK but its chief executive, Neil Campbell, said the devices would come in by air because “time is of the essence”.
Breas UK, a Stratford-upon-Avon company that specialises in ventilators, is also working with the NHS to supply ventilators in the more immediate term.
The company has tripled its capacity since December, adding employees and production lines, and moving to seven-day working at factories in the UK, Sweden and the US. It is also offering remote training on how to use the ventilators for medical staff unfamiliar with them.
“A Westminster source ”.....ah that explains it.
“What are the chances? All those ‘technology lessons’ in that flat with the pole dancing pole in, and still the urgent email from the EU about buying cheap ventilators ends up in Boris Johnson’s spam folder.
The detail we shall come on to shortly, but first there’s the even more unfortunate matter of the timing.
As emergency plans are activated all over the country, turning crematorium car parks and other such places into temporary mortuaries (when your delayed wedding day eventually comes around, do try not to think too hard about what the marquee’s been used for), truly it provides no pleasure to wheel out that old phrase about ‘burying bad news.’
At 5pm, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, strolled out again to face the TV cameras, delivering what, by my count, was his twelfth budget of the last nine days. It is hard not to wonder whether the real news snuck out at 4.57pm.
Not so long ago – less than a fortnight, in fact – though it feels like another geological era, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, was issuing a call to arms to every manufacturer in the UK to start producing ventilators. “If you make one we will buy it,” he said. “No number is too high.”
So there was some confusion over the fact that the UK had chosen not to take part in the EU’s ventilator procurement scheme, to which we had expressly and very publicly been invited, despite having left the EU what feels like several lifetimes ago.
The same old Brexit arguments apply here, which we’ll only trot through briefly. All the world wants ventilators; being part of a big bloc, as opposed to being a small country, increases your bargaining power and makes you more attractive to suppliers as you’ll be ordering in larger quantities, yada yada yada.
Surely we weren’t sitting out of the EU scheme out of sheer Brexiteer bloody-mindedness? Actually, it turns out, no, we weren’t. The reasoning provided (yes, at 4.57pm), is that the government didn’t get the emails.
Yes, that’s it. That’s really it. There’s a mad rush for ventilators, no number is too many, and there’s absolutely no time to lose, but an offer to join a massive ventilator procurement scheme somehow ended up in Boris Johnson’s spam folder or something like that.
Government sources have explained that there is no blame involved, and that it was just a mix-up. Given that it has somehow become generally accepted wisdom that it’s not OK to criticise the government (although we notice that the moment Johnson does something 93 per cent of the public support – namely bringing in a lockdown – is also the moment the Daily Telegraph withdraws its backing for him), we must take this explanation at face value.
It would be churlish to point out that, well, the 27 countries that are still in the EU all got the email, didn’t they?
We are continually told that now’s not the time to say such tiresome things as, well, Brexit was very obviously always a terrible idea. So we’d best not seek to make cheap political capital about the sad fact that those much-needed ventilators somehow ended up sitting in Johnson’s junk mail, stuck in grim purgatory somewhere amid the ads for penis-enlargement pills and various scam emails about outstanding child support payments (NB: not all junk emails are actually junk).
There’s also the small matter that the EU’s ventilator procurement scheme was announced at a public press conference, and that the UK could take part was said, on camera, on live television.
Still, we are told that we will consider taking part in “future rounds” now that we’ve missed out on this one.
After all, what’s the rush? At the time of writing, the government is still insisting that the Brexit transition period will end on 31 December, and that the most severe public health and economic crisis quite possibly of all time will have no bearing upon it. That completely pointless event must be rushed through in about a seventh of the time that any sensible analysis dictates is required.
But getting the ventilators in? Don’t panic: there’ll be another boat along in a minute.
It has been stressed that this has nothing to do with ideology. It’s not about Brexit, it’s just a “communications mishap.” At this point, the traditional rhetorical method is to point out that they’re either lying or they’re incompetent.
Mercifully, such is the accumulated evidence that we aren’t required to make that choice. It might very well be a matter of life and death, but it’s certainly not a case of either/or. Both of these options are very much alive. They’re practically indestructible.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/coronavirus-boris-johnson-ventilator-eu-scheme-nhs-a9429196.html?fbclid=IwAR03b6ApGaMyFcu2TB1-P_S_54KsVWqzreDh1SgPLmdHZitKJ4p9Qjlr-OoI can see you sitting there VS, muttering to yourself “ mmmm ended up in Boris’s spam folder....sounds rational to me “
