Changing times, similar challenges

Who having in 1964 established a small engineering business producing some of the NHS’s earliest nurse call systems from the basement of his three-storey West Midlands home, has since seen the company, Static Systems Group, grow to become one of the UK market-leaders in its field. The Institute’s President from 1979-1981, he looked back, during a fascinating two-hour discussion, at his time in the role, talked through some of the key technological and other changes he has seen in the past five decades, reflected on an interesting and varied career, and considered some of the very different current-day challenges that today’s IHEEM President, and the Institute as a whole, face.

Due to be 85 in January, Lawrence Turner shows – in the words of his son, and Static Systems’ commercial director, Chris – ‘no signs of slowing down’. Although, by his own admission, he no longer runs the company on a daily basis, preferring to leave that to his sons Adrian and Chris and the board of directors, he still visits the company’s Wombourne, Staffordshire headquarters perhaps a couple of times each month and, as the company’s chairman, takes enormous pride, and considerable interest, in its latest innovations, new developments, and the people involved – they are, after all, the lifeblood of a company of which he is clearly proud, and which remains family-owned to this day, nearly 50 years after he first established it. When I met the former IHEEM President at Static Systems’ head offices just south of Wolverhampton, his younger son, 54-year-old Chris, a pharmaceutical chemist by training, who joined Static Systems as commercial director in 2004, also took part in the discussions. Before the meeting got under way, however, the family theme was further underlined when current MD, Adrian Turner, the older of Lawrence’s two sons by two years, and himself a trained engineer, popped in to say ‘hello’.

Small beginnings