TUCKED away on a nondescript industrial estate in Royal Wootton Bassett is a hugely successful business that provides a vital lifeline to hundreds of hospitals around the country.

Surgeons rely on a steady supply of medical devices and donated skin, nerves, blood platelets and bones to help them heal people with severe burns and damaged joints.

Joint Operations and its sister company Regen Medical store and distribute lifesaving equipment and human tissue from their Interface Business Park base around the clock.

Donated organic material is kept at -80C at all times to ensure it’s ready to use when needed, while surgical products from small companies which cannot afford sales teams are sent over from abroad for the business to market.

Managing director Richard Forster said: “There are not a lot of companies that do what we do. For example, we’re the only people that provide donated human nerves and are the market leader for cartilage. Orthopaedics are life-enhancing but good quality skin grafts are life-saving.

“Organ donation is common in the UK but what we supply is not donated as often, so much of it has to come from overseas. It’s very important that it is all delivered, stored and sent to British hospitals properly.

“A group of 18 people support the surgeons, go into operations with them and help the nurses advise the surgeon on how best to use the products. There might be products from two or three different companies used during one operation.

“You need a good system to ensure there’s not a part missing during the operation and that they are the right size, it’s very labour-intensive and careful.

“If there is an issue, we need to be able to trace the tissue, bone and muscle back to the donor, so each one has a long number which reveals which hospital it went to, which centre it came from and who donated it.”

The Regen Medical outlet mainly helps surgeons to treat patients who are so badly and thoroughly burned that having a skin graft from another part of their body is not possible.

Much of the material being sent over is minute – tiny bone fragments to patch up kneecaps, scaffolds to repair slippery cartilage, gossamer-thin nerves to fix hands cut by glass or knives.

Blood platelets and plasma are separated from white and red blood cells by being spun in a centrifuge and trapped by gel that weighs a whisker more than they do.

The material is shipped over internationally in sealed boxes full of solid dry ice that looks like polystyrene foam, then kept in freezers at the Bassett company’s HQ before being delivered to hospitals who request them.

An alarm triggers if the temperature rises too high, and there are back-up CO2 cylinders that can pump into the freezers and keep everything cold enough during a power cut.

Mr Forster added; “The difference it’s made to patients is phenomenal. Our customers are amazing – we work with great nurses who are very good-natured and always very busy.

“We supply the hospital that invented the hip operation and supplied a microwave device that helped with (DJ) Chris Evans’ varicose veins treatment.

“The overall goal of Joint Operations is joint preservation. Knee replacement surgeries used to be more common but now they are closer to a last resort because new technology and innovation has created ways to preserve and save the original joints and help the body repair the damage.

“There’s now a lot of middle ground with different options – and we are one of the key players.

“We host training courses for surgeons in Bristol so that they learn how to use our products. There’s a lot of knowledge handed down and the technology is always slowly moving forward.

"We have a blog where the patients we helped share their stories. One said she could swim with her children and wear high heels after her leg operation."