INTERVIEW INTERVIEW Paul Dick Stein
Elsy
The Ventilator Challenge
UK consortium
has exemplified the
engineering response
to the Covid-19 crisis.
Jon Excell talks to the
group’s leader - HVM
Catapult Chief Dick Elsy
- about the challenges of
the project and how the
lessons learned can help
get UK manufacturing
back on its feet.
In mid-March 2020 – with UK Covid-19
cases apparently spiraling out of control -
unsettling news began to emerge from the
UK’s hospitals, where potentially crippling
shortages of critical medical equipment
threatened to overwhelm the NHS’s ability to
handle the crisis.
Cue a nationwide mobilisation of
manufacturers that has provided perhaps the
most compelling illustration since the Second
World War of the way in which engineers are
uniquely well suited to address the biggest
challenges of them all.
From tales of firms repurposing production
lines to produce face shields for health workers;
to stories of academic research groups
transforming themselves into manufacturers,
the engineering response to the pandemic has
straddled sectors and disciplines, and spurred
into action organisations of all shapes and sizes.
But arguably the most significant of these
responses in terms of sheer scale, ambition and
impact is Ventilator Challenge UK, a consortium
RISING TO THE CHALLENGE
June 2020 / www.theengineer.co.uk 18
of car makers, aerospace manufacturers,
medical technology firms and others who have
worked together to rapidly ramp up the
production of the ventilators required to treat
those most severely affected by the virus.
Led by High Value Manufacturing Catapult
chief executive Dick Elsy, the consortium -
which includes some of the biggest names in UK
manufacturing (see box out) - has achieved a
scale-up that many thought impossible -
producing 10 years’ worth of new ventilators in
just 10 weeks.
Earlier this month (May 2020) The Engineer
spoke to Elsy about the challenges of pulling
together a project of this scale and how the
lessons learned can help get UK manufacturing
back on its feet.
Reflecting on the helter-skelter, 18 hour
working days of the past few weeks Elsy said
that the first seeds for the consortium were
sown on March 16th when, in a call with
hundreds of manufacturers, the UK government
formally announced the launch of the
specification for a Rapidly Manufactured
Ventilator System (RMVS) that could be used in
UK hospitals.
“There were more than 100 industrialists on
the call,” recalled Elsy, “The cabinet office
presented the spec, there was a quick Q&A and
then Michael Gove said ‘right, over to you
industry, we need ventilators!’”
In what he describes as the “vacuum of
silence” that followed - as those on the call
pondered both the complexity of the challenge
and the grim consequences of failure – Elsy said
his “Catapult instinct” kicked in: “I thought this
is something where the HVM catapult could
help bring people together.”
He immediately started phoning around key
contacts and putting the consortium’s initial
building blocks in place. “Very quickly there was
a core of like-minded and engaged people who
The first shipment of
ventilators leaves
Penlon’s facility
/www.theengineer.co.uk