'Ten years worth of ventilators to be made in ten weeks' amid UK coronavirus pandemic

Jacob Jarvis21 April 2020

Ten years worth of ventilators are to be made in around just ten weeks to cope with demand during the coronavirus outbreak, the head of a consortium of manufacturers has said.

The VentilatorChallengeUK (VCUK) consortium was formed in mid-March after calls for companies to shift production to ventilators.

The companies involved have been described as a “dream team of British engineering” by its head Dick Elsy.

He said the speed of progress had been “staggering” and told the PA news agency: “We’ve only been together for just over a month and we’ve achieved in a month what would normally take 18 months or two years.

“The consortium brings together the pace of engineering of Formula 1, the robust manufacturing processes of big industry like Rolls-Royce and Airbus and the exacting standards of clinical device manufacturing.”

Medical device companies Penlon and Smiths Medical would typically produce a total of 50 to 60 ventilators per week.

With the work of the consortium, production of newly-adapted ventilators will be up to 1,500 per week by next month.

The Government has placed orders for 20,000 units.

Mr Elsy said: “We’re going to get through sort of 10 years worth of ventilator production in almost as many weeks. It’s a major industrial scale-up.”

The medical device approval process can take up to nine months, however Penlon’s Prima ES02 model was authorised by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in around three weeks.

The ventilator, which is based on an existing model, was approved for use in hospitals on April 16 after adjustments were made following feedback from clinicians.

Around 250 units have been sent out so far, including to the NHS Nightingale Hospital in London, and 15,000 of the Penlon model have been ordered by the Government

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