OPERATING THEATRE TECHNOLOGY


The Quasar eLite surgical light – designed in the UK with input from leading product designers and practicing surgeons – reportedly offers ‘near perfect colour rendition, with unique red balance control’.


Adrian Hall explained that Brandon’s iTCP system can already make a much more feature-rich set of information available to the ‘in-house’ BMS or to, say, a healthcare engineer monitoring it. He said: “Many NHS Trusts lack the resources to undertake much proactive maintenance themselves. We see remote monitoring and asset management developing in the coming years. Beyond that, we’re working on greater capacity to analyse that data, either within NHS datasets, or our own data warehousing, using Big Data-type analysis, to offer our healthcare customers predictive advice. “So, for instance, if the theatre temperature is too low, via monitoring you could identify this and potentially correlate it to the number of infections there, identifying trends and threats so that the Trust concerned can work on its best practice, better manage risks, and deliver improved clinical outcomes.” In the past 2-3 years, Brandon Medical has increasingly focused on incorporating smart technology into individual pieces of equipment, and developing a control environment that will allow it to start joining those together. Adrian Hall said: “We’ve completed a lot of the preparatory work of ‘smarting’ the equipment, and most recently have been working on developing those control environments to enable us to deliver some of the more advanced feature sets I’ve referred to. Now we have those base technologies, we’ve been seeking collaborations with people working in the information gathering and the electronic patient record environment, and outlining our capabilities to them.” I guessed that the key to this ability to collect, gather, analyse, and disseminate information was sensors incorporated into theatre and ICU components such as Brandon’s operating theatre lights.


Sensors in the environment Adrian Hall said: “SMART is indeed about having more sensors in the environment, so you know more about it, but you also the need the connectivity, and to transmit the data. We have wired, Ethernet-based, and bespoke coded wireless connectivity. Once you have the information, you need to collate it in a data hub, and be able to process it to draw conclusions. You then need the connectivity to inform an end-user of these. We’ve been working on these four elements for some years. Put it all together and you can create some fantastic added functionality in what is now a very smart operating theatre environment.” I asked him for some practical real-life examples of how


44 Health Estate Journal March 2025


such added functionality and information might help, say, a healthcare engineering department at a large acute hospital. He said: “A simple example is maintenance of the operating theatres’ battery systems. Previously, engineering staff have often had to test the batteries and run them flat for 2-3 hours on a Saturday to prove they’re working. This takes time, and can only be undertaken outside of operating hours, and at the end, the theatre is left without its emergency battery provision because the batteries are flat. If there’s a power cut, the theatre cannot function. “With this technology, however, we can build inferencing. For instance the smart theatre control panel knows the time, whether the lights or ventilation are turned off, and that nobody’s moved in the room for the last hour, so can make as complex an inference as you like, to say: “I’m pretty confident the operating room is empty, so I’ll turn the operating lights on to full power, and tell the battery system to go to ‘mains fail’ mode. I can then monitor the battery status for 20-30 minutes, and compare its condition to the same time the previous week. I can then trend predict that that battery needs replacing proactively, instead of waiting for failure maintenance, which is what happens most of the time.”


Theatre ‘refurb’ projects Another example is in theatre refurbishment projects. Adrian Hall explained: “When we refit, refurbish, or even build a new operating theatre, the information we need is not 100% available on most projects. Equally, with many theatre environments now ‘digital’, there’s considerable flexibility in terms of the layout, and with our technology we can now create ‘wizards’ to configure the room. For example, we may not know the exact configuration of the medical gas system. Previously we’d have spent considerable time detailing all of this, and gathering the information to build the control system. Nowadays, if the theatre will need a five-, instead of a four-gas system, at the push of a button we can reconfigure the medical gas system to any one of a number of templates.” This could be done ‘even at the last minute’, at the point of commissioning, without major re-work or re-programming. The greater flexibility of these digital systems also greatly simplified the delivery and updating of systems, even remotely, Adrian Hall explained: “So,” he added, “if we have a project on site, but no engineer, or there’s a complex change, our technical centre can dial onto that theatre and reconfigure it to meet the requirements of the project that needs to be handed over, whether it’s in Norfolk, Newcastle, Pakistan, or Nigeria.” I wondered to what extent this sort of ‘remote reconfiguration’ was now happening. “Risk management of digital room reconfiguration is


very much happening now,” Adrian Hall explained. “In fact, about 80% of the projects we’re delivering now take advantage of this functionality. It de-risks the project massively, both for the constructor, and the hospital – which is often under considerable pressure to get those new facilities operational to provide additional capacity.” Having discussed some of the key trends in theatre equipment and configuration, and how Brandon has responded, I asked my three ‘interviewees’ to elaborate on the rebrand, its timing, and the reasons behind it. Adrian Hall said: “The re-brand is based around our enormous development as a technology business since our last rebrand in the late 1990s. The familiar Brandon ‘lozenge’ is over 25 years’ old, and while it carried some heritage dating back to the 1940s, we wanted to signal our evolution into a technology business and a leading thinker in creating smart buildings using the modern smart technologies of the mid-2020s.”


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