On Monday, government officials confirmed that the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) had begun delivering ventilator blueprints to more than 60 military engineers and car manufacturers, including Rolls-Royce, Airbus, Jaguar Land Rover and Unipart. Their mandate was this: help the NHS fight the coronavirus by manufacturing 20,000 ventilators in their factories, something that Boris Johnson hopes could begin in as little as two weeks.
These ventilators will help people in intensive care units in the critical stages of Covid-19 by maintaining their respiratory function and helping them breathe. For many, ventilators could be the difference between life and death. But can car manufacturers and engineering companies really help to rapidly produce them?
Designing and manufacturing a ventilator is in no way a simple process, and some ventilator manufacturers are sceptical that car manufacturers will be able to make them at all. Jens Hallek, CEO at leading ventilator manufacturer Hamilton Medical, explains that the materials and the components needed to build a ventilator are “highly specific” and require “specialised know-how.”
“These are extremely sensitive machines with not only a lot of hardware, but also a lot of software. If one of the components does not work correctly, the whole machine shuts down and cannot be used anymore,” Hallek adds.
Hamilton Medical normally produces 220 ventilators a week, but Hallek says that it has since increased capacity and hopes to ramp up production to 400 ventilators soon. But current medical manufacturers promising to increase production will not solve the massive shortage of ventilators in the UK.
According to the DHSC, the NHS currently possesses 5,000 adult ventilators and 900 child ventilators, but health minister Matt Hancock says the service will need many more times that number to deal with the coronavirus.
Even so, medical manufacturers don't believe that other industries can step up to the plate to help. Regular ICU ventilators often have a number of components that change depending on the type of ventilator design. Broadly speaking, they all use things like pressure generators, patient circuits, an inspiratory flow regulator and a number of sensors, filters, valves and alarms. Put simply, they are complicated pieces of equipment that take time to manufacture.
“I think the idea of automotive manufacturers or indeed any manufacturer that is not well-versed in the production of medical devices somehow quickly retooling and making an alternative product is very naïve,” says Nick Oliver, automotive industry expert and management professor at the University of Edinburgh.
“There is no product that I can think of in the automotive industry that has to move air and oxygen around in a similar way to a ventilator.”
The number of ventilators and the complicated nature of building them isn’t the only thing that manufacturers need to think about when producing the device. The highly regulated world of medical instruments could be another issue that makes the rapid manufacturing of ventilators near impossible. Patricia Connolly, professor of bioengineering and director of the Strathclyde Institute of Medical Devices at the University of Strathclyde, says that medical devices like a ventilator will need to be rightly rigorously tested, and that they also require a license.
This license is tied to the manufacturer of the ventilator, who ultimately holds the responsibility for the device’s safety. It typically takes around three years to develop and launch a ventilator. After it’s been tested, the ventilator then needs to be signed off by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. Non-medical device manufacturers won’t already have a license to engineer a ventilator currently, so they would be focusing on existing designs.
“It could not be something that a manufacturer who was not a specialist in the area could look after right away,” says Connolly. “The way that this could be done is if a current manufacturer in the UK who has the proper certification for their device was to subcontract to another production line, then that manufacturer could take responsibility for the production of the device.”
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That seems to be the government’s plan so far. While manufacturers might not have the tools or expertise to design a ventilator, they could very well produce the parts. According to the Financial Times, Boris Johnson called on the manufacturers to help produce the components, as well as offer their own skills and expertise.
Connolly says that it would be sensible for a company already making medical instruments — but not necessarily ventilators — to help manufacture the parts as they would already have the required licenses. “In the UK there are a number of medical device manufacturers who just manufacture to other people's specifications, so it would be better not to go to car factories or engineering companies that have large tool lines, but to go to some of these manufacturers who already make devices for other people,” she says.
Car manufacturers could also struggle to procure the parts to manufacture the components, because ventilators are already in high demand. This could impact the supply chain. Matthias Holweg, professor of operations management at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, says that many of the electrical components come from China, and many of the provinces are still locked down so they may be difficult to procure.
Still, Holweg is more optimistic about the kind of help that car manufacturers can provide, noting that one of the manufacturers could already begin by making a metal chassis for the ventilators, providing current ventilator manufacturers with additional assembly capacity.
"Large manufacturers have workshops that they use to train the apprentices. They have general purpose equipment that they could use for [ventilation production]," Holweg says. He doesn’t expect them to invest in new equipment or use their main assembly lines for ventilator production.
Vauxhall has already volunteered to help, saying that it could assist by 3D printing ventilator parts. But as with many other industries, automotive production is slowly grinding to a halt. The company recently announced that it was shutting down the Ellesmere Port and Luton plants due to the coronavirus. And yesterday, BMW, Toyota and Honda joined Vauxhall in shutting down their factories.
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This project could fail before it even takes off, if the very workers that were meant to man production lines are unable to do so because of social distancing measures which have urged many workers to stay inside their homes.
The fight against the spread of coronavirus is a rapid race against the clock. And calling on non-medical device manufacturers might not speed things up all that much. Oliver, for example, says that it could take months.
Mark Swift, head of communications at manufacturing and engineering trade body Make UK, which represents 20,000 companies, says that because so many components are imported into the UK, it could take longer to set things up than the hopeful couple of weeks. "It can be done,” he emphasises. “But clearly, we don't have time."
Alex Lee is a writer for WIRED. He tweets from @1AlexL
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
