OPERATING THEATRE TECHNOLOGY


buttons, switches, and indicator lights. We thus pivoted to develop a digital information hub able not only to indicate the operating condition of the medical gas or ventilation system, or the theatre light, but equally of gathering data from the equipment and passing it into a package of information that can be made available to the building, or to the patient record.” The next step was ‘not just to passively gather that information, but rather to start making inferences from it’. Adrian Hall elaborated: “So, for example, you can start gathering information about the room temperature, and either just report it, or put some intelligence around it, perhaps saying: ‘In fact 20 °C is not warm enough for an operating theatre when the patient will be opened up and is suffering heat loss on the table’. ‘Conversely, 28 °C is too hot, creating an uncomfortable working environment, and potentially endangering the patient’.”


The iTCP Adrian Hall explained that the control panels in question had become Brandon Medical’s iTCP, or Intelligent Theatre Control Panel (see box, below) which had gone beyond simply being a control panel to becoming ‘a data concentrator and data hub’. The launch of the first version six years ago entailed digitising an existing control system of lights and switches. He said: “The subsequent iteration saw us incorporate the software to allow us to analyse some of the data and make inferences – for example to identify that the condition of the battery on a particular operating light is different to last week, and it perhaps needs changing. Then, we introduced the portal technology to allow the control system to communicate, and tell, say, the healthcare engineering team, of a component’s changing condition.” Adrian Hall continued: “What you then start seeing is smart technologies gathering sensor-generated information, and making inferences. This starts converging with Internet of Things (IoT) technology, allowing us to communicate through our data hub, to tell the hospital BMS system. Equally we can pass the data on to the shift


engineers’ hand-held device, or report it back to our data centre for analysis, or to our control centre. We can then tell a hospital: ‘We need to schedule some maintenance on your operating table or theatre lighting.’”


Remote monitoring capability With such connectivity, remote monitoring increasingly became a possibility. Adrian Hall explained: “As operating theatres and ICU rooms become more complex centres of technology, all this equipment needs maintaining. It simply isn’t practical for a man in a van who calls twice a year to do this. Not only is it too expensive, but the engineer may only be on site 2-3 days a year, and not on the day the plant breaks down. With online monitoring, we can predict faults, and when an issue arises, can have an engineer on site rapidly, equipped with the right kit and information to fix it first time. This drives much higher room and equipment availability.”


The Leeds-based company says the new branding underlines its ‘vision’ of ‘bringing SMART equipment / a SMART approach to setting up healthcare spaces – to play a vital role in shaping the hospitals of the future’.


Examples of Brandon Medical’s ‘smart’ technology


Brandon’s Medicontrol Intelligent Theatre Control panel, or ‘iTCP’ – an ‘intelligent digital, programmable, connected device with integral computers and communications’ – exemplifies the type of increasingly ‘smart’ technology the UK medtech company has developed, and continues to work on.


Alongside enabling clinical staff to


control elements such as lighting and ventilation in the operating theatre, the iTCP will also connect a range of theatre components – from lightning and ventilation to back-up batteries, to, say, a hospital’s Building Management System. Deploying an iTCP thus means healthcare engineers, based on site or remotely, can monitor anything from the ambient temperature in the theatre, and periods when it is not in use, to the condition of battery back- up systems. With components with finite life, this enables healthcare engineers, or indeed manufacturers’ own engineers, to


take the required preventative action – such as charging a battery system, or replacing an operating theatre light, before the component fails – a predictive, rather than the more ‘traditional’, reactive approach to maintenance. The iTCP can be used as standalone item, integrated with third-party equipment, or connected together as part of a Brandon Equipment Package (BEP). Brandon’s Symposia surgical video system, meanwhile, is ‘a digital media package’, designed specifically for healthcare facilities,


Alongside enabling clinical staff to control elements such as lighting and ventilation in the operating theatre, the iTCP will also connect theatre components – from lightning and ventilation to back-up batteries, to, say, a hospital’s Building Management System.


which connects medical professionals to a range of audio-visual resources which can be accessed immediately from any location. All audio and video communications can be two-way between all locations, for instance to facilitate training of surgeons either on the hospital campus, or anywhere else with the required connectivity. Doctors and nurses using Symposia, meanwhile, can access media from anywhere with a suitable network connection (subject to access controls).


March 2025 Health Estate Journal 43


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