Continuous Product Development And Testing For The Best Training Manikins
Our business was founded more than 30 years ago after a firefighter friend approached the family to see if Ruth could repair one of their in-house “home-made” manikins. Being the entrepreneur she is, Ruth told them she could make them something better and the first Ruth Lee manikin was created!
Since then we have supplied manikins to 100% of the British Fire & Rescue Services, health care providers, the armed forces, and industry/manufacturing giants including BMW and Glaxo-Smith-Kline. Our manikins are used in countless sectors and for a wide variety of training scenarios.
Since we started manufacturing manikins, one thing has always stood us apart – our absolute commitment to quality and durability.
With strong roots in the Fire and Rescue Service (Did you know our Export Director, Lawrence Lee was once a firefighter?) the durability of our manikins has always been our key goal and this means that customers in all sectors, from Care Homes and health care, to Offshore and Shipping, can be assured that they are buying the toughest manikins possible, which will withstand the rigours of training.
Customer feedback
We also know that it’s very important to our customers that the manikins are suited to specific training and we take customer feedback very seriously. Listening to your ideas has allowed us to develop several interesting manikins, such as our Multi-Trauma Dummy and Casualty Evacuation manikin for firefighter fitness training.
The entire range of manikins available today was created thanks to feedback and collaboration with our customers including the RNLI, NHS, Navy, various Fire & Rescue teams and training organisations such as Outreach Rescue and Rescue 3.
With their recommendations and special requests, we have adapted our products to create manikins which are suited to specific training scenarios including water rescue, bariatric rescue, patient handling training and mass casualty scenarios, to name a few. See just some of the sectors we work with here.
Testing, testing and more testing
We have a stringent design and product development process which ensures that all our range is fit for purpose. But even when manikins are signed off and available to buy, we frequently test and ‘tweak’ designs to make sure they continue to perform the very best.
This photograph is one of our Man Overboard manikins (AKA ‘Dead Fred’). He has been residing in a local lake for more than 12 months – and as you can see, he looks none the worse for it!
Likewise, these photographs are of our Body Recovery manikin, which we pitched into a frozen lake recently to see how it would cope!
When some work was being carried out near to the Ruth Lee factory, it seemed too good an opportunity to waste! After speaking to the foreman on site, we thought we would drive a digger over the legs of one of our Full-Bodied CPR manikins!
Working hard across the globe!
We have a network of Distributors across the world and they are also happy to help us test our manikins to the max!
In particular, So Young Trading in South Korea have put together some fantastic short videos showing our Duty Range manikin surviving being dropped from a second story window, driven over by a bus and dragged behind a moving vehicle!
We hope you will agree that Ruth Lee manikins are pretty tough. We are confident that they are amongst the more durable on the market today and we welcome your feedback on any of our products in the future. Please email mail@ruthlee.co.uk