Transcript
Bryn Jones
Good afternoon, everyone. What I’d like to just go through this afternoon is just a brief story about Bristol Maid, what we did as part of the design bugs out project that started in 2008. The story of the company, where that, there’s a change in design and how we actually introduced a new way of doing design has actually helped us change the products and will help change the procurement in the NHS.
So basically, as I’ve just explained, we’re going to talk about the company, design bugs out and the opportunity for improvement and how we can take it forward.
Brief history of Bristol Maid; we’re a manufacturing company in the heart of Dorset, been going since 1953, family-owned company. I would say we’re pretty typical of a small manufacturing enterprise that employ 200 people, very industrious and have been hard-working for a number of years.
And as a company we’ve grown up with the NHS and as you can see here, we produce a vast array of products for the NHS. We produce these from raw materials. We’re not just someone who buys the products in from the Far East and just imports them into the UK. We actually manufacture from raw materials. Everything you see there is purchased as raw material, designed and supplied into the NHS.
In 2005 we went through a journey, a bit of a change. We recognised that we needed to improve, manufacturing needed to improve and we introduced Lean manufacturing, and went through this process of trying to improve the whole process of manufacture through to the end customer.
As a result, we’ve become more efficient, we’re a better company for it and as part of that change we also realised we also needed to improve the way we supported our customers. The NHS is approximately 65% of our business. 10% is export, the others are distributors which typically support the care home market so generally speaking we are totally supporting the healthcare sector.
We’ve made some good achievements as a company. We’ve done our bit, we’ve actually become efficient, we’re a very sort of responsible sort of company in terms of we’ve done everything we can do to support British manufacturing.
Our next challenge was to support our product portfolio. As I showed on the previous slide, we’ve been around since 1953. The products haven’t really changed in the NHS that much since 1953. They’ve grown up and developed as customer specials and we’ve converted them into commercial products.
So why hasn’t that changed? Why was there sort of no driver for the change of the products? Well, for us, many of the products are traditional, they’ve been in the NHS for many years and that has been a blockage for why there hasn’t been change. People wanted the traditional products, they wanted to have the same as they’ve always had so trying to introduce something new was very difficult.
It was mentioned this morning, the cost versus new technology. We can offer new products, new technology and quite often the cost would go up, there would be [unclear] cost of that. Very difficult to introduce something without actually adding some value to the product but the problem then becomes, is the selling the features and benefits of the new technology, what it’s actually going to give back to the NHS, what are the improvements that we’re actually delivering?
The clinical procedures themselves, the protocols; there’s lots of things that are laid down in legislation where, again, it was talked about this morning in the building industry; the legislation was actually hampering development as well. It had to meet certain criteria. We had to design products to meet those criteria and it’s fairly inflexible.
Training, again, using the products to, in terms of using your products, affecting the training and protocols, how the nurses were taught and how they were actually taught to use the products was also sort of slowing down possibly introduction of new products. And also the standards, recognising sort of where we have to meet British standards on certain products. As a company we try t use the British standards as a template for our product design but that would also hamper how we can actually make changes.
Then a new set of drivers came along. In recent years, these have been well publicised; infection prevention is a big one and I’ll come onto that later on with the design bugs out, but also standardisation of clinical procedures. That has also, in some way, helped. Pharmacy control; there’s been a big push on keeping pharmacy controls on security of drugs, control of drugs. The introduction, the change of the healthcare commission to the CPFC that have made some changes.
And the big one on the bottom there, productive wards and theatres and that’s been a big change in recent months and I’ll come onto another project later on where that has really started to drive the change that we can hopefully, as a company, deliver.
And I come onto design bugs out. As part of our sort of need to improve our portfolio, we came onto the… Design bugs out was sort of part of the strategy to improve that process. We entered the competition with our design partner Kinneir Dufort. And as a result we produced a new bedside cabinet for the NHS.
Now, the process of achieving this is nowhere near the same process that was talked about this morning with regards to Jaguar and Land Rover but what I would say is that it’s been equally as involved with all the interested parties. We met here in London, several days here at the Design Council, bringing together the people from the procurement side, the users of the products, the cleaning staff, the facilities management teams, the manufactures and also the designers.
Pulled them together, got round the table and thrashed out what we thought to be the best specification for the product. It was our task as part of the project to go away and come up with some concepts for the designers, bring them back, show them to the interested parties and again, thrash out where we had gone wrong, what can we do better?
And as a result, what started off as a concept went through many changes. We had some great feedback, some very critical feedback. We were actually criticised at one point for not putting enough curves into the product, and quite rightly. We, you know, I think there was certainly an aim that, an argument that we’d actually been, stuck to our core values of using metal too much. What we try to do as a company is incorporate new materials, new designs and hopefully we’ve achieved that in changing our product portfolio.
So the success of the project, I think, bears some credit to the Design Council who helped facilitate it. It needed someone to pull us together. As a company supplying the NHS, it’s been very difficult in the last few years to try and get people round the table to discuss problems, to develop ideas and then to try to see them come through into the NHS. So actually having that round-table meeting was very important.
Having a clear focus and a clear strategy, the infection prevention, the desire to tackle superbugs, was a big driver and having that clear focus meant that we could talk to people on sort of one-to-one, they knew the problem, we knew the problem and we could have a common goal to resolve. The experts around the table, and showcase hospitals was another big aspect of the project that really helped introduce the new cabinets into the NHS.
In fact, there was a project team that was spread across the country who were actually helping to put the prototypes into the wards, do the clinical assessments and to help facilitate that new technology going into the NHS.
Intellectual property was also mentioned this morning. That has also been a bit of an issue with us as a company in the past in terms of how we handle intellectual property. There were no issues with design bugs out and how that was handled in commercial terms, with our design partners, was set up right from day one. And I would say that this was a project that didn’t have any issues because it was laid out right from day one, we knew where we stood, designers knew where they stood. And commercially, we’re going to take it forward and everyone benefits.
And also, the product; one of our design partners, Kinneir Dufort, has won some very good awards and I think one of the ones I’d like to sort of really highlight there is the better healthcare award in the middle. But part of the overall concept of the product was not just to improve the easy-clean nature of the actual cabinet itself but also we’re trying to tackle the bed space, the actual environment around the bed.
As a company, we’ve recognised that our products do have a big interface with the whole environment. A trolley isn’t just a trolley. It actually has a big, you know, impact on the ergonomics, the feel of the place and we believe that the bedside cabinet has actually helped change that environment for the patient, the user and also the visitors as well, coming into the hospitals.
On the incentives side, having someone to facilitate the project did make a big difference for us. The communication of the project aims, what we were trying to do as a company, throughout the NHS, was a big benefit. The funding for showcase hospitals – and I didn’t point out earlier on that we were awarded £25,000 as part of a grant for the design bugs out. That was a very small token in terms of the actual overall cost of the project.
What I think is the biggest thing that helped the project is the fact that there was some funding there for the showcase hospitals, there was some government money to, within the NHS, to facilitate the delivery of the products out into the wards themselves.
Some of the blockages that we had, and I think that all of these have been sort of talked about in one way or another this morning, I’ve put London-centred there and we’re in London and many a time in the last years I’ve actually come to London. But I think there’s an issue with that as well in the sense that sometimes too much is done here and I think we need to sort of spread that word across into other parts of the country and I think that is a challenge that does need to be resolved.
The innovation hubs; I think that one of the things I would say is that as a company, we’ve never really got involved in innovation hubs and I think there’s something that we need to resolve there in terms of how we actually approach the innovations that come via the innovation hubs. I think the way we’ve tackled the projects in the last few years, we would like to engage with them and I think I’d open that up to them to sort of contact us and we’ll make something happen.
Intellectual property versus commercial realism is something that does crop up on a regular basis. Who owns the design right, who’s going to get profit from it, who’s going to take it forward? It just needs to be resolved and I think that’s one of the areas that we did resolve quite quickly with the design bugs out and I think that’s one thing that we perhaps, there are some lessons there to learn and I’m happy to share what, our thoughts on that.
The NHS is a very large organisation and standardising on products to make them commercially appealable [sic] for a manufacturer to produce on higher volumes is difficult and we do have issues of trying to sort of make something fit, one size fits all. So I think there’s work to be done on standardisation.
Regulations, procurement costs versus efficiency and recognition of the features and benefits. Part of the procurement process is that typically, as a manufacturer, we’re given a specification and we try to meet that specification but occasionally we need to change the way we design to basically get across the features and benefits that we want to get into the NHS.
Just a quick case study is there that the design bugs out has changed the way we operate as a company. Because of that we have now started to do work with Helen Hamlin [?] Centre at the Royal College of Arts and as a company we’ve now changed our approach to design. We incorporate design into our whole build process and we try to engage with the customer.
And the final slide here, just basically is an example of our current products, moving onto hopefully the next generation.
And that’s where I’d like to leave it. Thank you.