MEDICAL GAS SYSTEMS
engineer’s job at Ohmeda, a division of BOC, based at Staveley near Chesterfield.” He got the job, and joined the company in September 1994. “At the time,” he explained, “Ohmeda had two sides – medical gas pipelines, and anaesthetic machines, and this job was with the former. Ohmeda’s MGPS business had previously been BOC Medishield Pipelines.”
After he had been in the role for just two months, BOC sold the Ohmeda business, and it became Hill-Rom Medæs. Richard Maycock then spent four and half years in the Hill-Rom Medæs R&D Design Department as an R&D design engineer designing medical gas pipeline products – including AVSUs, manifold control panels, and later medical air compressor and vacuum plant. After four and half years as a design engineer, he was asked to go out and provide product training to service and installation engineers. This entailed significant overseas travel, including, he recalls, to Beirut. “At this juncture, in 1999,” he explained, “I moved into training full- time, and began delivering commercially run AP and CP training to some Hill-Rom Medæs personnel, but mainly to external healthcare engineers and other hospital staff.”
Edexcel-approved training centre During a 10-year spell at Medæs, Richard Maycock progressed to Training manager, before in 2004 joining BOC – as Medical Engineering Services & Training manager – to formalise and expand the company’s medical gas system training, and set up Edexcel-approved training. He said: “While at BOC I developed its Authorised Person and Competent Person courses, and provided some other services, such as ‘As-fitted’ drawings.” At BOC he ‘grew’ the training team, and in 2010 began undertaking the AE (MGPS) role. Subsequently appointed Business manager, he was increasingly required to fulfil more-management-related roles, and to ‘hand over’ his AE work to others – ‘not a straightforward thing to do, given the expert nature of an AE’s job’. He explained: “In April 2016 I decided to leave the company, undertake the AE role full- time, and establish my own business, Medical Engineering Systems, working on my own as an independent Authorising Engineer, serving hospitals. I subsequently began taking on some compliance audit and risk assessment work.”
IHEEM-registered
Richard Maycock has been an IHEEM- registered AE (MGPS) since 2016, having had his first contact with the Institute in his early Ohmeda days. He served as East Midlands Branch chair from 2015-2017. He added: “To secure a place on the IHEEM AE (MGPS) Register, I worked for, and achieved, Incorporated Engineer status in
New centre’s location
The Durham training facility is located in a modern, single-storey office building about a mile from Durham train station. It incorporates a 20-seater classroom, and a medical gas plantroom for medical air, vacuum, and anaesthetic gas scavenging systems (AGSS). When we spoke by phone in late June, the medical gas supply pipeline was about to be delivered, soon after which the training centre would have a fully operational medical gas pipeline system.
David Cooper, who joined MES in July 2018 as Medical design engineer, is a specialist on AutoCAD systems.
2016.” I asked about Medical Engineering Systems’ development since its foundation three years ago, and particularly about it putting sufficient focus on training to be prepared to invest in leasing the new training centre and comprehensively fitting it out. “In fact,” said Richard Maycock, “Brian Armstrong, a former BOC colleague who joined MES in July 2017, has been one of the main drivers of our increased training focus. At BOC, Brian delivered a wide range of medical gas training, including AP, CP, Responsible Person, and DNO and nurse training. He now undertakes the vast bulk of the training we provide, while I will cover AP and CP training.”
Prior to the new training centre’s opening, Richard Maycock and Brian Armstrong delivered training exclusively at customer sites. Richard Maycock expanded: “In MES’s first two years in operation, as well as working with the NHS, I began working with two leading private healthcare providers, as their AE (MGPS). Working for one of them alone entails serving around 60 sites, and for the other, another 7 or 8. We also provide AE services and training for about 30 NHS hospital sites. “Since Brian Armstrong joined,” he continued, “we have been able to offer AE services, compliance audits, and risk assessments, as well as writing specifications for new MGPS projects for hospitals, and providing a broad range of training. Brian is currently in the process of completing the documentation to become an IHEEM-registered AE.”
Simulated ward area
Also accommodated within the training centre is a manifold room incorporating five cylinder manifold control panels, both wall and desk-mounted, with one attached to cylinders. Richard Maycock explained: “The system will be filled with medical air as soon as the pipeline is delivered.” He continued: “We also have a ward / theatre area – where half of the room has wall-mounted medical gas outlets, and the other half pendants incorporating outlets on suspended stands. We will be installing the pipeline so that all the pipework is visible, and have also incorporated some of the AVSUs outside the rooms, just as they would be on a hospital ward. There is also a lobby for teas, coffees, and sandwiches.”
Authorised Person courses run at the new training centre will include two and a half-day courses – for estates officers and engineers looking to refresh their knowledge and understanding of medical piped gas systems (HTM 02-01 states that, following their initial five-day ‘comprehensive’ AP course training, Authorised Persons (MGPS) should receive ‘refresher’ training every three years). “We will also be running a two- week ‘extended’ AP course, comprising two four-and a half-day ‘blocks’ of training, aimed at personnel who may be complete novices to hospitals and medical gases,” Richard Maycock explained. “Here we will be able to go into considerably more depth. On a ‘live’ medical gas system supplying a hospital, you can generally ‘look, but you can’t touch’, whereas here we will be able to
Alan Spraggon and other members of IHEEM’s North-East branch, at the branch’s 2019 AGM, held at the new Durham training unit on the day of its opening.
August 2019 Health Estate Journal 45
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