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31 min ago 3 min read
Medical oxygen reliability is significant when usual healthcare infrastructure becomes limited or unavailable, raising the question of how to build resilience within the healthcare sector prior to emergency healthcare situations.
Years on from the Covid-19 pandemic, medical gas providers and industry professionals are still applying their learnings to the healthcare space.
Speaking on a recent gasworld webinar, Leith Greenslade, Coordinator at Every Breath Counts Coalition, an organisation supporting countries to reduce pneumonia deaths, said people are the key component in achieving a reliable medical oxygen system.
In the context of low-and middle-income countries, she said, “We’ve spent a lot of time putting big machines out there…But if you don’t have the people on the ground, the clinicians who know how to operate them safely, and critically…the biomedical engineers who can maintain them when they break, it’s a waste of investment.”
In the future, Greenslade said there will be enormous pressure put on governments to invest in the people side of medical oxygen infrastructure.
Discussing the pandemic, Christel Besson, Homecare Business Development Director at Nippon Sanso Europe, said the emergency healthcare situation highlighted the need to adapt in real time and to ensure clear medical coordination to achieve resilience.
Echoing Greenslade, she named the human role as the most important within healthcare infrastructure during Covid, “being able to put in place collective intelligence to learn what is happening, to connect the people, and to adapt [decisions] is key.”
Greenslade also noted that the pandemic created a global momentum in the medical oxygen space.
The Global Fund recently reported that, in 2025, it completed many of its investments in medical oxygen. Total investment now amounts to almost $570m and covers the procurement, delivery, and potential installation of more than 400 pressure swing adsorption plants.
But when asked how she feels five years on, Greenslade said, “We can celebrate those gains, and we should.
“But people sometimes ask me if we had another pandemic like Covid tomorrow, what would happen? Would we see the same crisis with oxygen? And I’m afraid to say on all measures we would. We would see oxygen shortages again in many countries.”
The exposure of centralised oxygen supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic also changed the conversation for Mario Bolivar, General Manager and Vice-President of Global Sales at AirSep, a US manufacturer of non-cryogenic oxygen and nitrogen generation systems.
He said the conversation shifted from “’Why would I make oxygen if I can buy it?’ to ‘How do I guarantee oxygen for my hospital?’”
Some of the countries worst affected by the pandemic have been ramping up investments.
After heavily investing in hospital-based generation during Covid, India has increased its spending by 67.7% to ₹4,770 crore ($~493m) in its 2026–27 budget, targeting improvements to critical care facilities, laboratories, and hospitals.
The investment in new oxygen generation capacity marks a significant shift from the pre-pandemic reliance on centralised supply.
However, with Greenslade warning that shortages could still emerge on a Covid-19-like level, the question is whether governments can match their infrastructure spending with the technical expertise and maintenance capabilities needed to keep oxygen flowing.
