Fighting the pandemic has needed skills from our industry. Kathryn Kernohan reports on how Master Plumbers’ member organisation, Westaflex, answered the call to manufacture a product, which now supports frontline health care workers. Westaflex has provided customers with quality heating, ventilation and air conditioning products for more than 45 years – with the health care sector one of the industries it regularly services. But when COVID-19 hit Australia in early 2020, Westaflex shifted its focus to help manufacture an innovative new product for the industry – one that supported frontline health care workers in their fight against the pandemic. “It was April 2020 when we were first approached to assist with the concept of an ICU hood, and the first deliveries of products were made to Western Health a couple of months later, so it all happened very quickly,” remembers Michael Sterling, General Manager of Sales and Marketing at Westaflex.
18 | Australian Plumbing Industry Magazine | Autumn 2021
The concept of an ICU hood – a personalised ventilation hood to protect health care workers from catching COVID-19 while treating sick patients – came about when Associate Professor Forbes McGain from Western Health contacted Professor Jason Monty, head of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Melbourne. “We met with Professor Monty to talk through their concept and to demonstrate it, they had grabbed bits and pieces from shelves at Bunnings to prove the system would do what they were after. It was our job to look at purposebuilt equipment to ensure it would be quiet and efficient,” says Michael. The personalised hood, now known as the McMonty Medihood, is designed to be installed behind a
hospital bed and to cover a patient’s upper body and is large enough to accommodate other medical equipment. It reduces the risk of infection for health care workers, while allowing for easy communication and visual welfare checks. The unit has a fan at the rear to pull air over the patient, and a high-efficiency H13 filter to clean and scrub the air of small droplets of the virus. This is vital protection, as droplets expelled through coughing, sneezing and speaking are a key way in which COVID-19 is transmitted. “This is more about protecting our health care workers – we know that the patients are already sick and in the hands of professionals for treatment. This creates a physical
