Invention is never-ending for veteran entrepreneur Benedetti

spanning several companies employing 800 people, is littered with tales of entrepreneurship like these.

And he is hoping to write a few more into his story yet.

It had been thought that Mr Benedetti, the father of violinists Nicola and Stephanie Benedetti, was heading for retirement when he wound up Wallace Cameron, the Wishaw-based first-aid kit manufacturer, in 2013. And not least because of the way things ended there.

Wallace Cameron was liquidated with significant debts, albeit jobs were protected when the assets transferred to Vgroup of Milton Keynes. To this day Mr Benedetti, who was 69 at the time, admits he still feels guilty about it.

He suggests people in his adopted homeland can have short memories.

“I had seven successes,” he said. “Some of my businesses were [turning] over £100m, if you add them all together. It’s unforgiving, especially Scotland. I feel guilty about it. I’m thinking, Christ, I’ve employed hundreds of people. I didn’t walk away, I invested millions.”

But, far from signalling the end, he is back in the fray. Not that he has really been away.

Beyond the glare of publicity, the entrepreneur has been quietly developing a range of medical innovations for the health service, under his Hamilton-based Green Cross Medico firm.

The first is a device to ease the trauma patients often endure when medical professionals struggle to access veins for intravenous treatments, which often happens after people have had chemotherapy. It also occurs when patients are dehydrated.

Remarkably, Mr Benedetti explained, it is still common for people to be asked to put their arms in buckets of warm water in a bid to swell their veins in hospital wards around the country.

He hopes to all change that with the Airglove, which gently heats the patient’s arm by pumping warm air through a double-walled polythene glove. It has been approved by the NHS after successful trials in England, with Mr Benedetti due to fly to Rome soon for talks with a European distributor.

He admits that personal experience informed the innovation, which he believes has the potential to save the NHS millions of pounds. Around £6m could be saved initially, he said. That is based on the estimated £50,000 each of the UK’S 200 oncology units can save by reducing the amount of cannulation packs which have to be discarded when veins are not accessed successfully.

“We’ve been to the moon twice and we’re still using buckets of water,” Mr Benedetti said. “They’ve never come up with a solution for it and they’ve been looking at it for ages.

“It gave me the challenge, basically, [to think of] how else can you expand the veins. With me being in hospital, I had obviously experienced it. There were six holes to get [access to] my veins, and still they couldn’t find it. After the sixth, it becomes traumatic.”

Mr Benedetti said he has invested more than half a million pounds in research, patenting and manufacturing the Airglove product so far. But it is not the only medical device he has been working on. The inventor, who uses his commute from West Kilbride to Hamilton to mentally work through his ideas, has designed a device to overcome the problem of epidural catheters moving, be it during child birth or medical procedures.

“Here, about 60 per cent of women get an epidural when they have a baby,” Mr Benedetti said.

“Then they lie on their back and it moves it. Once it moves from the spine, the pain comes back, then they have got to tear it all out and do it all over again. We have come up with a product that is adjustable without taking the whole thing off. That’s my