Birthday Honours 2021: Covid ventilator tests bring MBE for professor

Prof Thomas Clutton-Brock said he was one player on a small team

A professor who developed a rapid service for testing ventilators during the pandemic has been appointed an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

Prof Thomas Clutton-Brock has worked in medicine for almost 40 years and is now director of the Medical Devices Testing and Evaluation Centre at the University of Birmingham.

When the prime minister asked firms to build ventilators, his team offered to test the equipment for free.

He said the MBE was "huge honour".

"The key thing is that although it is me who gets the award, which is very lovely, the fact is the facility and all equipment needed also required a huge amount of work from other people," he said.

"I am one player on a small team."

When the call went out to companies to design new ventilators, Prof Clutton-Brock said, his team offered to test them to see how difficult or easy they were for hospitals to use. They turned round reports in 24 hours.

Without Prof Clutton-Brock's work, unsafe ventilators could have entered the health care system harming already critically ill patients

His standards and reports are now being adopted internationally and his work enabled more than 4,000 new ventilators to be provided in two months.

He said his team had worked "seven days a week, for up to 12 hours a day for a long period of time last year".

"People came in over weekend, during the day, they would meet the devices at the front door, unpack them, test them, sleep, then get up and write their report," he said.

Due to problems in people getting to the site, Prof Clutton-Brock even recruited two of his daughters, Lucy, 23, and Hannah, 21, who are both history graduates, to help with things including setting up ventilators and filling out spreadsheets.

He said it had been a "huge privilege" to work with them both.

Although many of the ventilators were not used, Prof Clutton-Brock said they were developed "very quickly" and all would have worked if needed.

He is now working to develop the technology for other countries.

He said he had a "huge respect" for medical colleagues who had done "extraordinary" work on the front lines during the pandemic.

Other honours recipients from Birmingham and the Black Country include:

• Thomas Christopher George Wrigley, 59, head of security and emergency planning at the University of Birmingham, appointed MBE for services to higher education

• Karin Qureshi 61, mental health lead at Birmingham City University, made an MBE for services to mental health and higher education

• Sally Alexander, 46, head teacher and proprietor of Kimichi School, Birmingham, who becomes an MBE for services to education

• Julie Elizabeth Grainger, 62, group leader at Wolverhampton Alz Café, appointed MBE for charitable and voluntary services to sufferers of dementia and their families