Simucare Labs · Simulated-use testing & customer discovery
Simucare Labs puts your product into a working simulated clinical environment — real scenarios, real clinicians, real time pressure — so you learn what it actually does in use, what will stop people buying it, and what to build next. Before you spend a year answering the wrong questions.
They fail in the six seconds when someone under pressure has to work out how to use them. They fail because nobody asked the person who signs the purchase order what evidence they would need to see. They fail because a year of development carefully answered a question the market was never asking.
Finding that out properly — real clinicians, a realistic setting, someone recording what goes wrong — is the piece most founders and research teams cannot afford. Consultancies quote five figures before you have learned anything, and a clinician’s time is the scarcest thing in the NHS.
That gap is where good products die. Simucare Labs closes it early, while changing your mind is still cheap.
Not a focus group, and not a bench test.
Simucare runs medical emergency simulation for GP surgeries and dental practices every week. Labs opens that environment to the people building things — engineers, founders, research groups — and adds the clinicians, the scenario design and the observation that turn a demonstration into evidence.
NHS customer discovery is the bottleneck every founder hits. A Lab session brings the right stakeholders into the room — often ward staff, lab technicians and practice managers rather than consultants — and surfaces what they would need to see before they would buy. It also gives your engineers hours inside the clinical workflow they cannot get any other way.
Every session is recorded and structured so it can feed your risk management and usability engineering files — the documentation a medical device has to carry, built in parallel with the product rather than bolted on at the end.
Four steps, roughly six weeks.
Free, 45 minutes. What you have built, what decision you are stuck on, and what would change your mind. If a Lab session will not help, we tell you on this call.
We write scenarios around your product’s real moment of use and recruit the right end users for it — built the way we build CPD training cases, so behaviour under pressure is realistic rather than performed.
Your product goes into the scenario, repeatedly, with people who have never seen it — the same conditions each time, so what you learn is reproducible rather than anecdotal. Observed, timed, and filmed with consent. You watch. You do not get to explain it to them — that rule is the whole point.
A written report within ten working days: what happened, findings ranked by severity and by cost to fix, direct quotes from users, and what to answer next. Then a debrief call so you can argue with it.
Built for people who have to prove it.
Pre-market, chasing your first user evidence and a story that survives due diligence. You leave with third-party findings to put in front of an investor, not founder enthusiasm. A first engagement is scoped to fit inside a proof-of-concept or Innovation Voucher budget.
Technically sound but not yet workflow-compatible. Grant-funded, TRL 3–6, needing simulated-use data and human factors evidence to justify the next stage gate.
A new SKU, a redesign, or a product that keeps coming back with complaints nobody can reproduce in the factory.
PPE, safety equipment, training technology, handling aids — anything used by people who are stressed, gloved and in a hurry.
A product that works at home meets a different workflow here. A Lab session shows you how NHS teams actually use it before you commit to a UK launch, distributor or tender.
The environment already exists, and we have been on your side of the table.
Founded by John Barber — operating department practitioner, advanced life support instructor, and a teacher of foundation doctors who set up one of the first simulation centres in the north-west of England. Now an NHS Clinical Entrepreneur and a member of the Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Hub.
Simucare is developing its own medical device, LightSaver, through the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme. We have paid for bench testing, human factors work and regulatory advice ourselves — so we know which order to do it in, and which spend can wait.
Practising GPs, dentists, nurses, paramedics and hospital consultants across Northern Ireland, alongside university partners at Ulster — recruited for your scenario, not read off a standing list.
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. Lab sessions produce formative evidence — the exploratory work that shapes your design and feeds your usability engineering file. Summative validation is a separate, later, more formal exercise. We will tell you clearly where that line falls for your product.
No. The method works for anything used by people under time pressure — PPE, safety equipment, workplace tools, training technology. If your users are stressed, gloved or being watched, we can build a scenario for it.
No. Lab sessions use practising clinicians and simulation, not patients, so there is no research ethics committee to wait for and no patient data involved. Founders routinely lose months to that step. Your own regulatory pathway remains your responsibility — a Lab session informs it, it does not replace it.
Never. You own the product, the data and the footage. An NDA is standard, signed before the scoping call if you prefer.
Often. Invest NI Innovation Vouchers, Innovate UK grants, proof-of-concept funding and university enterprise budgets have all paid for work of this kind. Tell us where you are and we will tell you what we know about the routes open to you.
A first engagement is scoped to fit a proof-of-concept or Innovation Voucher budget, and larger programmes are quoted per project. Send us a paragraph on what you have built and we will come back with a price.
Typically three to four weeks — the time it takes to design scenarios properly and recruit the right participants rather than the available ones.
Send a paragraph on the product and the decision you are stuck on. We will come back with whether a Lab session would genuinely help — and if it would not, we will say so and point you somewhere better.
john.barber@simucare.co.uk