“These are unprecedented times. As the business that provides medical equipment and installs and maintains it going forward for the NHS, these are challenging times. We have been designated as key workers. We are doing everything we can to ensure that we can continue to provide the level of support for the NHS, because we know that it’s testing times for them especially.”
Speaking with the Leaders Council, Guy Pomroy, director of Starkstrom voiced his opinions on the current coronavirus pandemic.
Pomroy works to provide clinical infrastructure for hospitals, and notes that one of his first concerns is the safety of his staff.
He said: “Our factory is still working. We’ve introduced social distancing; we’ve increased significantly the facilities for handwashing.
“All of our staff that are able to work from home or those that are home based can continue to be home based, we’ve decanted everybody that’s office based, in either of our locations and they are all now working from home. We will be shutting the office that we have now in Middlesex today, and we will be confined to producing out of our production facility in Leicester.”
In spite of the pandemic, Starkstrom continue to operate. Their director notes: "We are continuing to produce equipment at the moment which is still essential, because we provide equipment to operating rooms and into ICU and high dependency units, there’s going to be a growing requirement for that at the moment – our factory is still working.
“We are still continuing to produce for a number of project based work that we do, but we have started to get requests for some of our equipment to go into temporary facilities, we will be ramping up our production accordingly. I’m very fortunate that I’ve got a great team, many of whom have been with us for many years and they are all digging in to do their level best.”
With Downing Street accused of putting “Brexit over breathing” earlier today, the work of Pomroy and his team is more important than ever.
He does recognise there are issues which come with the new home model of working, saying: “the problem with that is, making sure people have all the tools and equipment that they need. Our field service engineers need to do their job with their home as a base, so it’s about getting spares to them and currently we are still able to do that, so that’s if that’s required there’s parts in the factory and we are continuing to produce the equipment to meet the orders that we already have.”
He concludes: “We expect the NHS to want to keep functioning because it has to, and we continue to do our bit to make sure that we keep them as good as possible and we keep them up to speed with all their equipment. Some of our projects are still going on.”
