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Life-saving ventilators brought to the West Midlands from China were found to be unsafe and not for use on patients.
Government-coordinated emergency delivery could not be used in patients, confirmed Toby Lewis, executive director of Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust.
Both their trust and the University of Birmingham hospitals received urgent deliveries in early April amid fears they would run out of them during the surge in critical patients expected to require intensive care the following week.
But when doctors reviewed it at the Trust, which manages City and Sandwell Hospitals, it was found that the fans were unusable.
(Image: Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust)
Speaking at a regional briefing hosted by Mayor Andy Street today (Friday), he said: “We got some fans, we tested them, we had some concerns, we represented him to regional and national doctors and we shared our concerns.
“The fans were not used and did not harm the patients.”
He added: “In (another) overvoltage situation, we now have enough fans (in Birmingham and Black Country); if there is an overvoltage, which seems unlikely, we will have to come back to this topic.”
Earlier this month we reported that some fans delivered to local trusts were not usable and required repair.
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He said his hospital received 140 of the breathing devices. “We were getting nervous when we were falling short,” he said.
“It is fair to say that they are not the fans that our specialists would have chosen. They have some quirks.”
Fans are a vital tool in the fight to save lives. For severely affected patients, the ventilator takes over the body’s breathing process when the disease has caused failure of the lungs.
This gives the patient time to fight the infection and recover.
Earlier this week, NBC News reported that a Sandwell and West Birmingham Trust doctor had been concerned enough to write to Health Secretary Matt Hancock to warn them that they were not safe.
They wrote, “We believe that if used, significant harm to the patient is likely, including death.”
The day the fans arrived, Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister who is helping to coordinate the government’s response to the pandemic, thanked China for sending them.
The fans were part of a government campaign to increase the supply of fans from the 8,000 it had before the virus attack, to 30,000, so that anyone who needs it during the expected peak of the pandemic can have one while in intensive care. . However, that goal has been reduced as hospitals have been able to manage the number of people with Covid-19 who need their care.
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