K2 Medical driving growth with Plymouth development

A Plymouth-based medical services company that designs, develops and manufactures software and equipment to improve maternity care during labour is developing its own purpose built headquarters to support growth.

K2 Medical Systems has acquired a site on Plymouth International Business Park and will commence construction on the 10,000 sq ft property this month.

The new facility will enable the business to double production capacity of its baby monitoring equipment and to take on additional employees. It has already expanded its team from 20 employees 12 months ago to 36 at its existing Tamar Science Park base, and plans to add a further 11 people after the move.

HSBC’s South Devon Commercial Centre is supporting the project with a £1 million funding package, in a deal led by Senior Commercial Manager Steven Crouch. K2 Medical has also moved its business banking requirements to HSBC.

Following 10 years of research, the company was spun out of Derriford Hospital’s maternity department and University of Plymouth in 1999 and has been located at Tamar Science Park ever since. K2 Medical Systems has focused on how technology could improve patient and baby care during childbirth and has gone on to develop innovative and technology leading products that are now sold worldwide.

The company now specialises in producing online training programmes for doctors and midwives to access over the internet and a range of medical devices s to capture patient information during childbirth. It has also developed a computer system to enable medical practitioners to electronically input and store data, which is currently being used in over 45 hospitals in the UK, Ireland and Australia.

K2 Medical consistently invests heavily in research and development to enhance maternity safety and its latest product is a new software package called INFANT that interprets a baby’s heartbeat during labour to alert clinicians to potential problems in a timely way. The INFANT software has been the focus of a UK National Study in 20 hospitals across the UK during over 47,000 births. The INFANT study has been the largest maternity study to have ever been funded by the NHS and K2 Medical plans to roll the product out globally.

The company currently generates 20% of its £2.5m turnover from overseas sales and has subsidiaries in Australia and the US, as well as representation in the Middle East. It is expanding its product range to include training programmes and software packages in Italian and Spanish in a bid to target new markets.

Dr Robert Keith, K2 Medical Company Director, said: “We are very excited about developing our own purpose built facility. We are full to capacity at our existing site and this is constraining our growth. We are developing exciting products that help with patient and baby health during childbirth, making the process safer and giving medical practitioners more information on which to base decisions.”

Stephen Hancock, HSBC Area Commercial Director for South Devon and Cornwall, said: “This is a business that recognises the power of R&D to drive its business forward and the new facility will support that area further. Recent HSBC research shows that the UK is falling behind in R&D spend compared to our global competitors and it is businesses like K2 Medical who are helping to address that trend.”