With its trainers possessing some of the UK’s leading expertise in the design and operation of medical gas systems – a number having worked in the field since the early 1970s – specialist medical gas training provider and consultancy, MGPS Services, offers its wide range of courses today from what it believes to be the UK’s best-equipped training facility for all working with, or responsible for, the safe and efficient operation of medical gas pipeline systems.
HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.
Taking up an invitation to see what makes the MGPS Services training offer stand out, I met with the company’s co-founder and director, Steve Goddard, at the headquarters of medical gas installation specialist, Midland Medical Services (MMS), in Rowley Regis, near Dudley in the West Midlands. MMS director, Keith Merrick, has leased the comprehensively equipped medical gas training facility there to MGPS Services since 2006, and joined in the discussions. Steve Goddard explained that MGPS Services, which was established in 2003 as MGPS Training by he and Peter Williams, is headquartered in Bristol, but provides what it claims is a field-leading portfolio of medical gas system training courses from the facility at MMS. The two MGPS Services co-founders, assisted by two other trainers and several highly experienced consultants, are two of only six Authorising Engineers for Medical Gas Pipeline Systems in England and Scotland to be listed on the official IHEEM Register for such personnel. (The IHEEM AE (MGPS) Register was established in 2010 to provide assurance to healthcare and other facilities seeking AE (MGPS) services of high standards of competence and expertise. Details can be found on the IHEEM website, at www.iheem.org.uk). Both men are former employees of the training establishment known today as Eastwood Park (formerly the National Centre for Hospital Engineering) – well-known for its healthcare technical training. Steve Goddard joined the Gloucestershire facility in 1981 as a technician demonstrator, and, following an interim four-year spell away in the healthcare equipment sphere, returned there as a lecturer and training consultant in 1990. Peter Williams BSc (Hons) worked in the NHS during the 1970s and 1980s as a hospital engineer and senior hospital engineer [as one of the early Authorised Persons (MGPS)], joining the National Centre for Hospital Engineering – which first ran medical gas-related training in the early 1970s – in 1983, as a lecturer in the Medical Department. He was the first trainer from Falfield to run on-site courses at hospitals for operators of medical gas systems.
Experience overseas
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