It is a good job that people under anaesthetic are not awake to see the tubes that go down their throat, says Paul Wightman. It is doubly fortunate that the patients do not realise what is happening, because as well as the tubes, people coming round in the recovery ward often have a variety of devices in their mouths.

Mr Wightman proudly displays the wads of gauze, sticking plaster and wooden spatulas which he has collected from anaesthetists who are forced to devise makeshift solutions to the problem of patients who unknowingly bite their way through tubes and stop breathing.

Mr Wightman's company, OGM, has come up with its own, rather neater device a 95p plastic BreathSafe bite block which he believes is what consultants and patients have been waiting for.

"It's so simple, but so necessary," he said.

Although OGM has been in existence for 40 years, the BreatheSafe is, amazingly, the company's first product. Until now, OGM has built itself up to a £6.3m turnover by making things for other people as a sub-contractor making plastic moulds and assemblies for anyone from German engineering giant Siemen, to medical companies such as GE Healthcare.

The BreatheSafe, which is already being used by 20 London hospitals, was born from a moment of realisation, following OGM's loss of a contract for a wound drainage device in 2001.

Mr Wightman said: "We had been involved in the design and development, then three months later the £1.8m contract went to Mexico. We had 16 people here assembling it. We were making money from it and there was nothing we could do to stop it going.

"We are very good at what we do, but we need to secure our future against the never-ending flow of work out of the country to less costly locations.

"British manufacturing companies who just put some liquid plastic into a mould and get it out at the end cannot compete on cost with China and Eastern Europe."

Not only are wage costs higher in Britain, but OGM has seen its electricity costs increase by 92 per cent in 18 months. "You talk to customers about inflationary costs and they say, actually we wanted a decrease'."

The lost contract was soon replaced, but the event marked a watershed for the company.

"For the past 12-15 years, we have been adding value by design and development at the front end, and through assembly and printing at the back end, plus stock handling and logistics, providing the product at the time that the customer wants it.

"We have done all we can to adopt lean manufacturing and continuous improvement. We deliver 150,000 items to Siemens every day at 6am, and 100 per cent on time," said Mr Wightman.

"But even with all the things that we have been doing, it cannot last for ever. The price differential for those companies who source from China is growing wider. Even if they increase their costs at 10 per cent a year, and we increase at 3 per cent, the absolute difference is so great that the cost gap is still widening.

"We cannot stand still, so we decided to develop our own product. That means we will have to build a sales team, look for products that we can patent, so that we are masters of our own destiny."

Mr Wightman is the son of Bev Wightman, who founded the company with John Mumford and Ivan Owen, starting in 1962 in a workshop in the Woodstock factory of sister company Owen Mumford, which makes medical equipment.

After moving to Eynsham a few years later, the company expanded to take over a factory on the opposite side of the road. Now it is poised for further growth. Paul Wightman has spent the past five years planning the company's new go-it-alone products. It has required a huge investment of time and money for such a small company, but one he believes is necessary. "It has taken five years. We identified medical as the area we want to be involved in, since 50 per cent of what we do is for medical companies, and we know the margins are high. We went to hospitals to get ideas just talking to people. There are a lot of ideas out there.

"The NHS is the biggest medical business in Europe and plenty of people are looking for someone like us who can take the idea, do the market research, develop a design, patent it, make a prototype and test and take it to market."

In the end, the best idea came through the company's local connections. Dr Jane Shepherd, a consultant anaesthetist at St Mary's Hospital in London, heard about OGM's search for medical ideas from her mother, who lives in Headington and is a shareholder of OGM.

The company listened to her idea and used its years of expertise to hand-make resin models, then turn out rapid prototypes of BreatheSafe, which were tried out on 100 patients. After a few minor changes, the BreatheSafe was launched last year.

Mr Wightman said: "We didn't want to take on a salesperson until we had tested the water. We offered it to 30 hospitals and 20 of them took it straight away a pretty good strike rate for a new product."

Another 70 hospitals expressed interest after the device was given away free at anaesthetics conferences, and the company has now taken on its first full-time salesperson. "We were reluctant to employ people until we knew that there was a good potential for the product," said Mr Wightman.

OGM's workforce has grown from 60 to 85 over the past few years, and will grow more if sales take off, with management already searching for bigger premises.

Mr Wightman said: "We are good at what we have done up to now. Obviously, we are going to continue to drive to do better and to fight the competition.

"But we have decided to do more than that. British sub-contracting cannot compete on price, so you have to do something else."