Manufacturing ways to beat Covid-19 - the engineers helping hospitals be more efficient

You may not think factories have much in common with medicine, but manufacturing experts are working to make one major hospital more efficient.

Researchers from the Institute for Manufacturing in Cambridge are working with medical teams battling the coronavirus crisis to help manage the crisis.

The academics from the IfM, which is part of the University of Cambridge's engineering department, have turned their attention from production lines to the flow of patients through wards and the logistics of managing vital medical supply chains.

The IfM Building Credit: The Institute for Manufacturing

Duncan McFarlane, Professor in Industrial Information Engineering said they have been looking at how a rise in patient numbers could impact day-to-day activities at the hospital.

The engineers have been working on a simulations - to see the impact of increased patient numbers or staff shortages might effect the hospital.

Industrial engineering students are also volunteering to focus on the hospital’s oxygen supply, and how it might be replenished and filtered.

Dr Ewen Cameron, Director of Improvement and Transformation at Cambridge University Hospitals, added: “At this time of unprecedented change for the NHS, our teams are working around the clock to set up innovative ways of working to best care for patients and protect our staff.

“The hospital looks very different now to a few weeks ago, and we remain open to additional ideas on how to manage this crisis as best we can. New challenges require new ways of thinking, and we are hugely grateful to the Institute for Manufacturing for offering their expertise to help us beat the virus.”

Meanwhile the University of East Anglia has offered up its computing capacity to an international project which could help develop potentially life-saving therapies.

The Norwich-based university is donating four of its powerful graphic processing units, servers which contain high powered graphics cards, to the Folding@home (FAH) project. The FAH is a project created by Stanford University in California in October 2000, which uses idle computer power to help simulate how proteins fold in the human body. The siumations then help researchers look for potential treatments.

Fiona Lettice, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, said:

Fiona Lettice, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, said

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