About VC International (VCI)

The Company - The Managing Director

The Company

We design and manufacture electronic medical alarm systems and community care products for the Australasian market. Generically, these products are known as personal response systems (PRS).

Over the course of our history, we established market leadership, and have become a major supplier of personal response systems to the Victorian Department of Human Services and the Commonwealth Department of Veterans Affairs.

All VCI products are proudly designed and manufactured in Australia, configured to meet the specific requirements of customers. The company is committed to maintaining the highest possible Australian content in our products to ensure their effectiveness under the service conditions encountered and reliability in use.

With a prior history spanning more than two decades, VCI has accumulated considerable depth and breadth of experience and knowledge in the design, manufacture and application of personal response systems.

VCI was formed following the sale of the former VitalCall personal response call centre business to Chubb Security in 1999. The new company retained the intellectual property to the PRS technology and the manufacturing facility. From then, VCI embarked on the design and manufacture of PRS equipment for the wider Australasian marketplace, which the company continues today, supplying major medical alarm monitoring companies and residential care organisations.

Managing Director of VCI, Phil Wait, was a founder of the former company and has been involved throughout.

To maintain our technological and market leadership, our business is based on the application of high technology, from the selection of component technologies to the use of computer-aided design and development, through automated manufacturing facilities and testing of the final products. Our design and manufacturing capabilities are unmatched in the Australasian marketplace.

We are constantly developing products designed to improve the lives and care of elderly or at-risk Australians and their carers, providing a means for them to easily call for help in response to medical or domestic events where assistance is needed.

Our Head Office is located in Lane Cove, New South Wales, an inner suburb of the State capital, Sydney. Manufacturing operations are located at Penrith, a modern city 50 km to the west of Sydney’s central business district.

VCI is a founding member of the Personal Emergency Response Services Association (PERSA), which serves to represent the industry and consumers.

The Managing Director

Phil Wait

Phil Wait has held a passion for electronics from early primary school. His interests broadened while at Sydney Grammar School to include various volatile chemicals and explosives (legally obtainable by youngsters at that time), off-road vehicles and his father’s ‘37 Oldsmobile - the usual, along with expanding his interests in radio and electronics. The latter led to Phil gaining his Amateur Radio licence in 1968, a hobby which set the course of his later career.

Along the way he discovered the delights of sailing. The sport’s attractions remain irresistible.

Phil’s professional career began as a trainee with the Australian Government’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC), obtaining an Electronics & Communications Engineering Certificate at North Sydney TAFE. While at OTC, Phil accumulated significant experience in satellite and terrestrial telecommunications, radio communications and switching systems; knowledge and experience which would prove useful in later years in the medical alarm industry. (OTC later merged with Telecom Australia, privatized as Telstra, but Phil was long gone).

Leaving OTC to broaden his career, in 1974 Phil joined the Department of Physiology at Sydney University, designing and building specialized equipment for various academic research projects, later transferring to the Electrical Engineering faculty. This exposed him to the intricacies of PCs (programmable calculators, printed circuits, popular chicks etc), printed circuit manufacture, physiological instrumentation design and low power wireless technologies.

Phil was lured from academia in 1978 to the world of publishing to become staff engineer at Electronics Today International magazine (ETI), developing and describing do-it-yourself electronic projects for the popular monthly magazine. Among the wide variety of projects he developed was a popular hi-fi amplifier featuring performance rivaling expensive brand-name equipment of the era and a metal detector that sold in the thousands as kits offered by many electronics retailers.

Three months in a yacht race from Jakarta to Rotterdam in 1980 gave Phil lots of time to contemplate his future. Phil later left publishing’s rough and tumble and, with a business partner, acquired the fledgling VitalCall from Ciba-Geigy in 1982, a business which subsequently became very significant in the personal medical alarm industry. Phil instigated manufacturing his company’s medical alarms in Australia and introduced many technological developments, including high performance two-way voice communications and a range of revolutionary low-cost wireless nurse call systems. After building VitalCall into a major manufacturer and supplier of personal medical alarm systems and services, Phil sold the VitalCall business in 1999 but retained the intellectual property to the technology along with the Australian manufacturing business. That retained business became VC International Pty Ltd.

Phil Wait’s depth and breadth of experience in the personal medical alarm industry is unmatched. The knowledge and expertise he gained over the broad sweep of his early career and 17 years in the medical alarm service industry to 1999, has underpinned the technological development of VCI’s products to date, so that they meet the unique conditions and challenges faced in the Australasian marketplace.

Ever a man to keep the big picture in mind, Phil is involved as an active member on the Executive of the Personal Emergency Response Association (PERSA), serves on the Standards Australia Committee that sets standards for personal medical alarms, and represents the interests of radio communications users on Standards Australia’s Broadband over Powerline Working Group. Phil is also a director of the Wireless Institute of Australia (WIA), advocating the interests of Australia’s 16,000 radio amateurs.