UK Ventilator Challenge Delivers Another 150 Machines. The UK now has over 11,000 ventilators on hand
A batch of new ventilators from the Government’s Ventilator Challenge has arrived in the UK this week.
150 Vivo65 and the Nippy4 ventilators from the Government’s Ventilator Challenge has arrived in the UK this week to continue supporting NHS patients with coronavirus.
The new ventilators are existing designs, already approved by regulators, and the Cabinet Office has assisted the Swedish company Breas Medical, who also operate in Stratford-Upon-Avon, to ramp up the production of their ventilators, by supporting new production lines, negotiating with suppliers to source critical components and expediting shipments of key parts from around the world.
The existing products have proven to be clinically excellent in a number of different settings. The Government has ordered 2000 of the devices, with hundreds expected to arrive over the coming weeks.
The Vivo65 and the Nippy4+ ventilators join the Penlon Prima ESO2 and the Smiths paraPAC models as Ventilator Challenge devices which are available to the NHS.
A further 449 Ventilator Challenge devices are now available to the NHS frontline, with hundreds more arriving over the coming weeks. Government efforts to increase ventilator capacity have already seen an additional 2,600 mechanical ventilators made available to the NHS since the start of the pandemic. The UK now has over 11,000 mechanical invasive ventilators available in total.
During the coronavirus pandemic, everyone who has required a ventilator has had access to one, but the Government will continue to increase capacity through its three pillar strategy: procuring more ventilators from overseas, scaling up the production of existing or modified designs and working to design and manufacture new devices.
The Government recently announced that 15,000 Penlon Prima ESO2 ventilators have been ordered, the first newly-adapted device to receive regulatory approval in the Ventilator Challenge, with production set to ramp up in the coming weeks. Smiths paraPAC ventilators, an existing device, are also being manufactured at speed and at scale as part of the Ventilator Challenge.
Devices that have been selected to continue as part of the Ventilator Challenge have been selected based upon expert clinical and technical advice. This includes feedback from rigorous testing of the ventilators by clinical experts to ensure that they meet the necessary standards for patient safety and effectiveness of treatment, which is of vital importance for any new ventilator design.
The selection criteria also takes into account projections for ventilator demand, the availability of other devices which already have regulatory approval, the performance and clinical usefulness of each device and the progress to date on each device’s overall development.
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