Teleflex Medical, a medical equipment manufacturer in Jaffrey, broke ground Tuesday on an 8,200-square-foot expansion to its Plantation Drive facilities, with plans to have construction complete by the end of the year.

The addition will be an expansion of facilities where Teleflex produces polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, tubing, and fluorinated ethylene propylene, or FEP, heat shrink products, which are used in medical-grade devices such as catheter builds, cardiology, neurology and radiology. Teleflex Senior Engineering Manager Jake Wagner said the new building will be connected to and supportive of the company’s existing processes, and will tie into Teleflex’s existing production space.

The expansion will also bring new jobs to Teleflex, which already hosts about 350 positions. Wagner said it hasn’t been determined the exact amount of growth that will come with the expansion, but it will include new entry-level operator positions, as well as more technical engineering and support staff positions, across all shifts, and seven days a week.

“Teleflex is very excited about this expansion. We obviously love it here is Jaffrey. This addition is going to be adding over 8,000 square feet of additional space, which is going to house our very specialized PTFE extrusion tower,”  Wagner said as he and other members of Teleflex’s leadership and the project builders and engineers symbolically broke ground on Tuesday morning. “The products that we make here in Jaffrey, and specifically in this tower, are sold to our customers across the world, which go into lifesaving medical devices. We’re very proud to be part of this community here in Jaffrey and greater New Hampshire.”

The groundbreaking was the first step in a long-time planning process to give the plant more capacity as a response to an increase in customer demand, which spiked after the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Wagner.

“We’ve been planning this since early 2022,” said Wagner. “After the pandemic, after elective surgeries came back, our customers influxed us with additional orders for our products, so that required us to increase capacity across the board.”

Wagner said Teleflex is continually growing, but the increase in demand spurred the project.

“We’re always looking to grow, so this was going to occur at some point in the future, I think the influx of orders after the pandemic really helped drive this forward a bit quicker,” Wagner said.

Teleflex started in Jaffrey in the late 1970s, and at that time, was producing mostly marine and automotive tubing, but began to concentrate on medical-grade tubing in the early 2000s, and now that is its full focus, Wagner said.

Teleflex intends to complete construction of the building by the last quarter of the year, and be in production for the start of 2024.

Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172, Ext. 244, or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaariMLT.

]]>