Ventilation firm breathes new life into important NHS facility

A Worcestershire firm has helped to secure the long-term future of an important NHS facility in Birmingham.

The West Midlands Rehabilitation Centre’s prosthetic limbs workshops in Selly Oak, which first opened in the 1960s, were in dire need of a facelift.

The centre provides support for patients with mobility and motion difficulties, as well as amputees.  Despite being a much-valued resource, the current prosthetic limbs workshops had become outdated.

Bromsgrove-based HME Tech was appointed by the Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust to carry out the ventilation work for the project. The firm manufactures, supplies and installs exhaust ventilation equipment.

Much of the work was bespoke because of the kind of work undertaken at the centre. There was a particular need to maintain a clean environment.

Project manager, Kevin Simkin, said: “Over the years, the workshops have been added to, and adapted, on numerous occasions.  In every instance, improvements only solved a particular problem at a given time and never addressed the longer term challenges.  A lot of our old equipment was dated and limited.”

Faced with the choice of demolishing and rebuilding or relocating, the trust decided a better option would be to facelift the 350 sqm workshop instead.

Mr Simkin said: “The Trust took the decision in January 2016 to invest in improving the efficiency and functionality of the space. In the 50 years since the workshops were first built, the world has moved on with new health and safety regulations, time-saving tools and new working practices.

“The refurbishment provided the perfect opportunity to completely overhaul the environment and increase our level and quantity of output.”

The specialist workshop process includes grinding, cutting and polishing various metals, wood, carbon fibre, foam and plaster which all create different types of dust. Every element was designed by HME Tech to meet the 25-strong team’s specialist needs.

Every aspect of the workshops’ workflow process was therefore addressed, from the level of lighting and room temperature to the dust and fume extraction equipment.

One of the major challenges for the project was to redesign the extraction points to create one efficient central system.
The HME Tech team even added fixtures so that dust could be collected from a fixed point to ensure the clean environment was maintained.

A separate room contains custom-made moulding equipment for digitally scanning and calving prosthetic limbs and this had to remain a controlled environment but the existing equipment was inefficient.

HME Tech therefore designed a stand-alone solution that is ten times faster and more efficient than before.