‘First in Africa’ — Canada-based centre partners procurement firm on mobile life-support system

Ese Owie, executive chairman of Numelec Africa Holdings, says the firm has entered into a partnership with Thornhill Medical Centre, a firm based in Canada, on the introduction of a life-support system in Africa. 

According to a statement, Owie said the life-saving technology, identified as “MOVES SLC”, will support the work of health workers and military medical personnel.

“For years during many conflicts across Africa and around the world, military strategists have struggled with the medical evacuation and critical care of both civilian and military casualties on the frontlines and the care of civilian casualties when citizens are critically injured through natural disaster or violence,” the statement reads.

“Hitherto, the standard practice for most Military Medical Corps was to coordinate – in extreme conditions – the deployment of multiple medical devices including ventilators, heavy and sometimes dangerous of transport oxygen tanks, anesthesia machines, patient monitors, and ancillary ICU equipment in Forward Operating Bases, air ambulances, or on the front lines with a view to providing emergency care for wounded soldiers and other casualties.

“This is set to change with the debut on the Continent of an innovative Medevac and mobile, micro-integrated life-support system called MOVES® SLC™ that enables military medical personnel and civilian health workers to provide advanced life support and surgery in places where it would otherwise be impossible.

“Going forward, caring for the unprecedented surge of war-zone and disaster trauma cases would be helped by the debut of unique, cutting-edge technology that is the flagship product of Thornhill Medical, a leading MedTech innovation firm based in Toronto, Canada.

“The firm’s portable life-support system extends the critical care window while combining an oxygen concentrator, a unique O2-conserving ventilator, suction, and complete vital signs monitor in a single, rugged, portable, battery-powered single unit without the need for oxygen cylinders and can be hand-carried.”

According to Owie, the system will offer urgent life-saving support and surgery to patients in disaster-ravaged areas as well as regions that are difficult to access.

“MOVES SLC brings critical care to wherever the patient is. Critically injured patients and military personnel can be cared for immediately and longer whether they are in battle, at a disaster scene, in transport or in a remote, rural healthcare facility,” Owie said.

“In Sub-Saharan Africa, where national governments have, over the years, contended with managing critical care cases far from where many patients are at the Primary Health Care (PHC) level, the MOVES SLC would also fill this gap in care by providing mobile life-support technology in Africa’s most remote, rural communities.

“Remote areas, battle fields and regions hit by disaster often lack an accessible and available supply of oxygen and electricity to treat critically injured patients in need of life-support systems. The Thornhill medical battery-operated and oxygen-generating technology solves this problem.

“Beyond its benefit for the military, the MOVES SLC is set to transform Primary Health Care as we know it, as well as disaster relief and humanitarian emergency operations, given its portability, cutting-edge technology, and overall technological agility.

“The continent’s extractive industries would also benefit from the solutions afforded by the ‘easily carried, rugged and oxygen creating life-support system as this would greatly provide critical care in deep-sea oil exploration platforms and complex mining operations.”

See photos below.