Team Consulting won the Design Project of the Year award for their work developing an emergency ventilator called EVA 1.5 to address the urgent need for additional ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were asked to develop, manufacture, and deliver safety critical ventilators in just six weeks, when it usually takes years. By identifying an existing ventilator design from Diamedica and adapting it, along with an agile development process, they were able to design, test, and transfer the EVA 1.5 ventilator to manufacture within the tight six week timeframe. This unprecedented effort to develop a critical medical device from scratch so quickly through collaborative work was a remarkable technical success given the urgent situation

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WHAT THE JUDGES SAID
SHORTLIST
A TEAM EFFORT
Undertaking to design and deliver emergency ventilator apparatus during the
height of the pandemic has won Team Consulting this year’s prize.
In March 2020, it was predicted the
UK would need over 30,000 additional
ventilators to help support COVID-19
patients. While medical device design and
development usually takes years, Team
Consulting was asked by the UK Government
to join the Ventilator Challenge and develop,
manufacture and deliver safety critical
ventilators in just six weeks.
At a time when hospitals were at risk
of becoming overrun and global supply
chains were under threat, Team quickly
identified Diamedica as a UK manufacturer
of ventilators proven to operate safely and
effectively in limited resource settings. An
agreement was quickly put in place to allow
key Diamedica IP to be utilised to de-risk the
process of developing a novel, emergency
ventilator in a matter of weeks (ventilators
typically take years to develop). The key
challenge was then translating the Diamedica
IP into a novel ventilator with a UK-only
supply chain and without scavenging the
existing supply chain of the Diamedica
ventilator.
This was an unprecedented situation for
medical device design and development,
that called for fast innovation and pragmatic
decisions at a time when the healthcare
system was at its most vulnerable and
many countries were moving into lockdown.
The project team assembled committed
themselves completely to this important
task, working incredibly long hours across
weekends and long into the night throughout
the six-week period. Some staff camped in
the carpark for weeks on end to avoid the risk
of returning home to families under lockdown
conditions.
With such a short timeframe for
completion, the project required an agile
approach and the effective
management of multiple
concurrent activities,
spanning mechanical design,
pneumatics and hydraulics,
software and electronics,
industrial design, human
factors, risk management,
testing, quality assurance,
transfer to manufacture and
technical file generation.
The Emergency Ventilator
Apparatus (EVA 1.5) was
developed and design frozen
in 4 weeks, with verification,
transfer to manufacture and
technical file generation
completed in 6 weeks. The
full EVA 1.5 design and
development history has now
been transferred to the UK
Government and the Crown.
No safety-critical device has ever been
developed from scratch to CE mark in a few
weeks, let alone under global lockdown
conditions. To de-risk the safety critical
aspects of the development Team had to
find a way to “stand on the shoulders of
giants” by building on the knowledge and
state of the art within the UK for ventilation
under emergency use and limited resource
conditions. With multiple countries seeking
to source sophisticated ICU ventilators, we
believed it was important to deliver an option
that could be robust, reliable and suitably
capable to save lives under a worst-case,
disaster scenario .
Faced with the task of delivering a highly
complex and safety-critical medical device in
a matter of weeks, the team found ways to
de-risk the project wherever possible.
Clearly an
extraordinary team effort
to deliver technical design
success in an urgent
situation.
SPONSORED BY
DESIGN PROJECT OF THE YEAR
EVA 1.5 - Emergency Ventilator – Team Consulting
■ ALARMAFLASH – Amber Valley
Developments
■ Array Cable Monitoring System –
Dynamic Load Monitoring (UK)
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