OPERATING THEATRE TECHNOLOGY
Manufacturing, assembly, testing, and inspection ongoing at Brandon’s well-equipped Morley factory. Reinsberg says one of the reasons for its acquisition of the British business is that it has a full-blown portfolio of medical, operating, and examination lights, that it hasn’t previously had.
To find out more both about the re-brand, and the
Reinsberg acquisition, I met by ‘Teams’ in mid-December with Brandon Medical’s CEO, Adrian Hall, the company’s Executive Chairman, Graeme Hall, and Reinsberg Group CEO, Dr Markus Keussen. I began by asking Adrian Hall about the re-brand. He
explained: “The re-brand is an activity we were heading towards to mark the progression of Brandon Medical from the business we acquired in 1993 – that made strong but basic operating lights and control panels. Since then, our strategy has been to develop the business into a recognised and respected medtech business.”
‘Human-centric’ design for an ICU space.
Importance of data recognised Explaining how this evolution had occurred, he continued: “A decade ago we identified the growing importance of data in life sciences and the healthcare environment, and started to see that the operating theatre had become much more technology-laden. It was clear that the theatre or ICU space would evolve into a more integrated environment, with more and more technology – including both AV and patient-aware devices, and equipment gathering information from the patient. Ultimately, all this data would need to be effectively gathered, directed, and
collated, into what we now recognise as the electronic patient record, so we started on a journey, and were proud to be one of the earlier businesses to identify this start on the journey to create ‘smart’ equipment that is able to communicate in an integrated environment.” The evolution of such ‘smart’ medical equipment had
gathered pace, with Brandon Medical ‘contributing as a thought-leader’, Adrian Hall explained. He elaborated: “Just a few years ago, people would refer to ‘integrated’ operating rooms or theatres – a development mainly driven by the move to more minimal invasive surgery. These were generally ordinary operating theatres with minimally invasive surgery equipment and some video routing or capture. We recognised the importance of the shift towards minimally invasive equipment, and subsequently the introduction of robots. However, we could envisage this developing much further – to a point where users such as an NHS Trust would want to gather information from both the patient environment and the patient journey. This entailed not just taking information from the clinical team, but also from equipment that is part of the built environment. Here I’m not solely referring to our operating lights, but also our control panels, which integrate with medical gas systems, and our electrical systems. All this data is quite difficult to gather for the traditional players in the electronic patient record space, because their focus has always been on gathering information from the clinical equipment and team.”
Creating a ‘roadmap’ Brandon Medical’s first step to address the requirement for more advanced technology to collate, analyse, and then transmit, data on, say, the ICU or operating theatre environment, had been to create a ‘5-7-year roadmap’. Adrian Hall elaborated: “We used this period to start to coalesce the different equipment we made into an integrated environment. The first stage was to start incorporating smart technologies into the separate components – such as the theatre lights, and the power and control systems. Once these products can communicate, you need an information hub at the room’s centre, capable of collecting and gathering information from the equipment, bringing it together, putting the data into meaningful ‘packages’, and processing it.” He continued: “Brandon had made control panels for 30 years, but previously they simply incorporated ‘dumb’
42 Health Estate Journal March 2025
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 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76
