NHS Trust boards’ growing demands for major capital purchases to offer both short-term “added value”, and sound longer-term ROI, coupled with estates and facilities teams’ growing involvement in specifying, installing, and subsequently maintaining, the sophisticated equipment and control systems found in modern-day operating theatres, have meant a radical re-think in approach to winning new business for Trumpf Medical Systems.
MD Oliver Law explained the background and thinking to the change in strategy, and discussed the company’s ambitious future plans, with HEJ’s Jonathan Baillie.
Despite having only been with Trumpf Medical Systems for a relatively short 14 months, Oliver Law has, in that time, already made a significant and successful mark, having, for example, successfully masterminded and overseen a substantial re-structuring of the company’s salesforce and customer service departments, and established a new service department, project manager unit, and commercial team. The re-structuring had, he explained, as we sat talking in an attractive glass-fronted office overlooking the large Luton showroom where some of the sizeable machinery used to manufacture the company’s medical equipment is the first thing visitors see, occurred first and foremost to ensure that the company, which is part of the German-headquartered manufacturing enterprise the Trumpf Group, is even more responsive to changing customer needs and sector trends. Alongside the restructuring, and “an almost seamless transition” from its former Malmesbury location to its impressive new operating base in a sizeable industrial unit on the Luton Business Park, the company has also recently completed and opened (see HEJ – October 2009) an impressive new medical technology centre within the building (adjacent to the showroom). This incorporates simulated intensive care and operating theatre environments equipped with some of the latest, and most sophisticated, Trumpf equipment. Officially opened last September, the self-contained centre is designed so that anyone from an orthopaedic surgeon to an estates and facilities director can get to know, hands-on, the capabilities of Trumpf Medical Systems’ latest pendant, lighting, and operating table systems, in an environment that mimics, as closely as possible, the set-up typically encountered in a modern-day hospital. One of the many technologies visitors can see without, of course, disrupting the flow of a busy operating theatre list, is AmbientLine, a lighting system just launched in the UK designed to speed post-operative recovery by using different brightness and colour phases to simulate natural daylight and darkness in areas such as ICU units where a lack of windows, and thus natural daylight, may otherwise (studies have shown) slow down recuperation by rendering individuals depressed, anxious, and confused “after as little as a few days”.
Meeting current challenges
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