General Motors now manufacturing critical care ventilators

GM received a contract from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to produce 30,000 ventilators.

Ventech the company that makes critical care ventilators needed help manufacturing the large number which is why General Motors got involved.

Stockpile and in need.

News 18's meredith hackler spoke with a gm representative who explains why the kokomo plant was chosen for the life- saving work.

In just thr short weeks, general motors was able to transform its kokomo plants operations.

"it really just shows that when you have teams that are motivated and committed to a cause you can do incredible things and the team in kokomo is doing some incredible work."

Gm received a contract from the u.s. department of health and human services to produce 30- thousand ventilators.

Ventech the company that makes critical care ventilator..

Needed help manufacturing the large number - which is why general motors got involved.

"ventech has been in business for years and they build a great product .

But they needed some manufacturing and purchasing help so they could scale up production of their critical care ventilators beyond the point that they could do on their own."

While the ventilators will help saves thousands of lives..

The company is also providing around 1,000 jobs for people in the area.

"the first groups of people that we brought back in were kokomo employees that had been laid off.

In addition we canvassed the marion indiana workforce for volunteers and when i say volunteers they are paid volunteers."

Each volunteer employee had go through new training to be able to build the ventilators.

The kokomo staff has experience building electronic components.

"when we were looking for plants that we could build ventilators at kokomo rose to the top based on available capacity at the facility and the experience of the workforce it just made sense."

And without that workforce manufacturing these life saving machines wouldn't be possible.

"we couldn't be doing this without the volunteers that are willing to come in and build these products for our country.

We appreciate their commitment."

Meredith hackler news 18.

The company says it will have the capacity to build more ventilators once they manufacture the initial 30-thousand... but at this time making those initial 30-thousand is their priority.