OPERATING THEATRE TECHNOLOGY
Using tech innovation to address global challenges
In the past two years, many manufacturing companies have reported difficulties obtaining key components due to a worldwide production slowdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by surging demand. They have also faced a volatile energy market and rising utility costs, exacerbated by the war in the Ukraine, and challenges in recruiting staff. HEJ’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, spoke to Executive Chairman at Leeds-headquartered medical technology specialist, Brandon Medical, Graeme Hall, and the company’s Chief Technical Officer, Nigel Davill, to find out how the business has adapted.
Brandon Medical designs and manufactures ‘world-leading technology solutions’ for operating theatres, critical care areas, and primary care institutions. It prides itself on the quality of its engineering, on innovation – with considerable investment in R&D, and much of its hardware and software designed ‘in house’ – and on its incorporation of ‘cutting edge’ technology into products ranging from theatre lights to medical AV systems. With a global customer base, it is ‘an acknowledged expert’ in medical lighting, medical power and control systems, and medical AV systems. The company also claims ‘unique expertise’ in providing integrated solutions. This is an especially valuable asset today given that many hospitals now wish to integrate a range of increasingly sophisticated medical devices using digital technology, so that not only will they operate seamlessly together in a theatre or other clinical environment, but will also connect wirelessly to equipment in other locations – for instance to allow streaming of live or recorded footage of surgery to another hospital site for training or knowledge- sharing within the surgical community.
The integration factor ‘Integration’ is indeed a byword for the Yorkshire-headquartered technology specialist; it not only integrates various clinically driven innovations, but also provides open architecture solutions. These enable an operating theatre to be ‘connected’ to a hospital’s building management system, which provides a range of benefits – including the fact that the close monitoring and control thus enabled can support energy savings and a healthcare user’s Net Zero drive, while the data collected during surgery can provide valuable post-surgical insights – the company cites an aeroplane’s ‘black box’, and the data it provides post-flight, as an analogy. Equally, as Brandon puts it, ‘the ability to closely monitor the performance and utilisation of the capital equipment
Brandon Medical says its ‘intelligent’ theatre control panel, the Medicontrol iTCP, was designed with both infection control and ease of use in mind.
in an operating theatre means we can truly start to talk about the hospital of the future’.
Innovative theatre control panel Later in a wide-ranging recent ‘Teams’ discussion with Graeme Hall and Nigel Davill – and very much along the aforementioned lines – we discussed the company’s development of an ‘intelligent’ theatre control panel, the Medicontrol iTCP, which won a 2022 Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Innovation, the Building Better Healthcare 2022 Award for Best Interior Building Product last November, and was also Highly Commended in the Best Carbon Reduction Initiative category in the same competition. Launched in 2019, the iTCP enables theatre equipment to be integrated with a hospital’s BMS system using protocols such as BACnet and Modbus – already integral to many such systems’ operation. While the iTCP hardware incorporates BACnet and other
BMS protocol capabilities, Brandon says many competitor theatres panels do not, meaning that until now, many operating theatre components have not been directly accessible via a ‘traditional’ BMS.
Developed using BMS protocols Brandon’s National Specifications manager, Richard McAuley, explains – in a video introducing the product – that the Medicontrol Intelligent Theatre Control Panel, or ‘iTCP’, was specifically developed around an industry standard control and command platform that uses BACnet. This enables it to ‘act as the bridge’ between specialist medical systems and traditional building management systems. Developing innovatively engineered
products is clearly one of the key ways that Brandon Medical maintains its competitive edge. However, like any manufacturer, it relies on the availability of parts to manufacture its products, fulfil orders promptly, and keep its customers
January 2023 Health Estate Journal 55
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73
