Coronavirus: UK-made short-term ventilators ‘no use whatsoever’ says ICU expert Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine head says Government’s request at odds with requirements set out by medical experts last month

The UK’s homegrown hospital ventilator programme risks failing to produce machines suitable for treating coronavirus patients, according to the head of the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine.

Alison Pittard said the Government’s request for ventilators that would — at a minimum — stabilise patients “for a few hours” was at odds with the request from medical experts last month who wanted devices that would work for the duration of a Covid-19 patient’s stay in intensive care.

Dr Pittard, who was among a group of medical experts who advised on minimum specifications for ventilators in early March, told the Financial Times: “If we had been told that that was the case, that the ventilators were only to treat a patient for a few hours. we’d have said: ‘Don’t bother, you’re wasting your time. That’s of no use whatsoever.”

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At the end of March ministers ordered 10,000 extra ventilators on top of the 8,000 that were already in the NHS. Some 1,850 extra have been acquired over the past month, but some experts said officials have prioritised the production of simplistic devices.

Formula One

Companies such as Dyson, JCB, Rolls-Royce and McLaren have said they were responding to the call from Boris Johnson last month for UK manufacturing to help supply more ventilators for the NHS. However, each design has to pass regulatory tests and a number of the projects have been stood down.

Last weekend the Cabinet Office confirmed it was cancelling plans for thousands of basic ventilators proposed by the BlueSky consortium, which include the Renault and Red Bull Formula One teams, because they were not suitable for treating Covid patients.

Meanwhile, a clinical trial will assess whether treating critically-ill Covid-19 patients earlier with non-invasive ventilation could cut the need to use invasive mechanical ventilators later on. The joint trial, run by the University of Warwick and Queen’s University Belfast and involving up to 4,000 UK patients, will seek to find alternatives to ventilators.

Researchers will compare the effects of standard care, incubation and invasive ventilation, with non-invasive treatments like use of the continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) method, with air delivered through a tight-fitting face mask.

It will also compare use of the high flow nasal oxygen (HFNO) system, which delivers warmed oxygen through tubes in the nose, and the standard care of air delivered via a mask. It is hoped that by comparing treatment pathways, clinicians can better understand which are best at cutting the need for invasive treatment.