Australian companies to build 2,000 ventilators to boost coronavirus capacity | Coronavirus

Two thousand new ventilators will be built in Australia by the end of July, a significant boost to hospitals’ ability to respond to Covid-19.

The federal government has also enacted new powers allowing the Minister of Health to exempt ventilators from the usual Therapeutic Goods Administration safety and performance laws in a bid to rush equipment into hospitals.

Federal and state authorities have worked frantically to increase ventilator inventories during the coronavirus crisis.

The federal government wants to triple the capacity of intensive care units, but modeling suggests there are currently not enough invasive ventilators – used to help critically ill Covid-19 patients breathe – to support such an increase. .

On Thursday, Federal Industry Minister Karen Andrews and Victorian Employment Minister Martin Pakula announced that 2,000 new invasive ventilators would be produced by a consortium of local companies, led by Gray Innovation, a Victorian company.

The Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre, an industry-led not-for-profit organization, helped broker the deal, which within weeks transformed Gray Innovation and its consortium into one of only two Australian manufacturers of fans.

Its managing director, Jens Goennemann, said the project was completed with remarkable speed.

“Have you seen anything like that in the making? It’s great,” he told the Guardian.

Goennemann said it showed the value of having an advanced and versatile manufacturing sector in Australia.

“You can’t answer if you’re just an assembler,” he said. “You have to respond by being a maker. The entire value chain: R&D, design, logistics, distribution and after-sales service. It’s the versatility, the resilience of a good manufacturing sector.

The additional ventilators will be almost double ventilator stocks in Australia. Investigations on Intensive care units combined with hospital data suggest that Australia currently has around 2,300 invasive ventilators. Hospitals have the capacity to expand to 4,258 intensive care beds (191% increase), but this could only be offset by an increase of 2,631 invasive ventilators (120% increase), leaving a potential shortfall.

The federal government’s $31.3 million deal with the Gray Innovation Consortium is supported by a $500,000 grant from the Government of Victoria.

Production will start in June and end in late July, using an existing design – owned by a separate, overseas-certified medical device maker – to get the ventilators to hospitals sooner.

“This agreement demonstrates the power of bringing Australian manufacturers and clinicians together and also reflects the highly advanced manufacturing capability that exists in our country,” Andrews said in a statement.

The announcement comes just a day after new powers were enacted giving ministerial authority to exempt ventilators from the usual safety and performance requirements of the Therapeutic Products Act.

Such exemptions can only be granted by the Minister “so that the devices can be made available on an emergency basis in Australia to deal with a real threat to public health caused by an emergency”.

The new powers were registered on Wednesday and will end on January 31, 2021.

Ventilators are essential to respond to Covid-19. Shortages in places like Italy and the United States have had disastrous effects and, in some cases, have forced doctors to decide which patients in overwhelmed intensive care units will have access to vital equipment.