A plastics manufacturing company says it can help hospitals and hospital suppliers to make many of the products and components found in wards in a way which is cheaper, more durable – and easier to sterilise.
Osprey Plastics says many of the dated component designs and traditional materials used in hospitals are unnecessarily difficult to clean and sterilise – and that modern technology can facilitate designs which eliminate or reduce many of the problems.
Company boss Jeff Smith says it is often the most mundane items that are made of dated materials, or which have dated designs, which his company can radically improve – and (often) produce at lower cost.
“Good design and manufacturing processes can simply make cleaning easier and faster – which in turn will help in the fight against superbugs,” he said. “Often the changes you are making are small – and may not have been possible when the item in question was first brought onto the market.”
Osprey’s secret weapon is state-of-the-art gas injection technology from British manufacturer Cinpres. “It allows us to make things that previously could not be made in plastic,” he says. “We can often eliminate difficult-to-reach nooks and crannies – some of them tiny – which can harbour dirt and infection. We can reduce the weight of items, and radically improve manufacturing cycle times, all of which has an impact on cost. It’s a real recession-beater.”
The technology also allows Osprey to make ultra-lightweight products and components (lightweight items are easier for staff to move, and cheaper to transport – a major cost in many manufactured items).
The firm has already chalked up its first success – winning a contract to manufacture the ‘spacer bars’ used in hospital immobility beds over a firm which had been making them …. in MDF.
“If you made these things out of plastic using traditional gas injection methods, they’d weigh 300g each and take 90 seconds to make. We won the business after we got that down to 220g and 50 seconds, because we had re-equipped with the Cinpres technology. The difference may not sound much but it has a critical impact on cost when you are manufacturing in bulk. There are multiple opportunities for successes like this right across the health sector.”
