EBME
“Ultimately, I saw our role as transferring skills to the NHS staff who needed to manage these facilities going forward. This is where good relationships and collaboration between the private and public sector are important,” she commented.
A military mindset Avensys worked in collaboration with MTS at Excel and had a large number of engineers on site. The company’s clinical engineers were also involved with Harrogate, Bristol, Manchester and Exeter. “Working with ‘competitor companies’ and OEMs has been fruitful for all concerned and bodes well for the future,” commented Robert Strange, CEO at Avensys. “At the end of the day, all the engineers – irrespective of employer – simply wanted the same result and set about the task as a team. I think good friendships have been made. “At Harrogate and Bristol, we were involved in the procurement of some of the equipment, as well as engineering support on site,” Strange continued. “Recycling older infusion devices, ventilators and suction pumps was equally important and beneficial. We were able to draw on our contacts within
The major lesson to be learnt for the future is that proper pandemic planning and putting real contingencies in place, in terms of medical equipment, would be at a fraction of the cost – perhaps hundreds of millions of pounds versus the hundreds of billions of pounds
that this has cost the whole economy. David Rolfe
this industry and across the globe. We are now part of the Vamed International group and this wider community was helpful from a procurement perspective,” he explained. The fact that a number of the engineers were ex-forces, with a history of emergency situations, also helped, according to Strange: “The company has been founded by ex- military personnel with experience from a number of conflicts around the globe, and our senior engineers at the Nightingale sites were all ex-military. They were used to working all hours in an emergency situation
to get the job done – establishing a robust structure; quickly establishing a workshop area; and then facilitating a ‘production line’ of engineers.”
Commissioning equipment, servicing and repairing equipment, and purchase of devices were key at all these sites. However, it was also necessary to share equipment between Nightingale hospitals to cover the shortfalls in certain devices.
“In these instances, we relayed some equipment between sites using company vehicles and admin staff, speeding up the process that would normally take weeks. If one site needed an infusion pump, for example, and another site had excess, we would simply load it into the back of a van and have the device commissioned and available that same day. I cannot express how important it is to have a military mindset in this sort of arena,” commented Strange.
Additional training for the Nightingale Hospitals has been a key requirement.
Training Training and lines of communication are also important in these emergency situations, and additional training at the Excel site was a key requirement. Avensys training academy established a temporary training facility, at the Crown Plaza next to the Excel arena, where it provided training for other engineers and clinical scientists on the basics of ventilators, gasses, anaesthetic machines, monitors and infusion pumps.
The company trained an additional 80 engineers and clinical scientists on the fundamentals of the equipment. This helped clinical scientists develop their knowledge of areas such as fault finding with anaesthetic machines, for example. The company also developed an 18-hour, online training platform to support hospitals across the country.
Strange hopes a new appreciation for the clinical engineering role will lead to increased investment in EBME departments across UK hospitals in the future. He believes the NHS needs to develop its in-house teams. “During this pandemic, biomedical engineers have been recognised as key workers for the first time in their lives,” he commented. “At the Nightingale Excel
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