Photo: Josh Reynolds for The Boston Globe
IV Safe T developers Melinda Watman (left) and Maggie McLaughlin have spent about $5,000 to make a prototype to keep IVs from slipping out of newborns.
Nurses have been a largely overlooked source of innovative ideas although they are constantly jury-rigging improvements to keep patients comfortable. Fortunately, people in the medical-device field are beginning to recognize the possibilities.
Andy Rosen writes at the Boston Globe, “Maggie McLaughlin’s path from nurse to entrepreneur started last year when an IV tube became unhooked from an infant in the neonatal intensive care unit at Tufts Medical Center, where she works, causing the child to begin bleeding unexpectedly.
“A specialist in IV procedures, McLaughlin was asked to study ways of preventing such an incident from happening again, and she learned there is no universally accepted tool to safely lock the line onto an infant’s tiny body. …
“Since then McLaughlin has been working to develop an IV connection that lies flatter on an infant’s skin and holds more securely to the needle than the alternatives on the market today. She has teamed up with a former nurse she met at a Northeastern University event to form a company called IV Safe T to make and market the device.
“McLaughlin is among a number of nurses — with the help of programs from nursing schools and their own hospitals — who are using their bedside experience to develop new products and innovations in the medical industry.
“Rebecca Love, director of the year-old Nurse Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at NU, said research has shown that nurses spend a significant portion of each shift using workarounds and making impromptu fixes to ineffective processes or equipment. …
“The NU program, which connects nurses to resources and guidance to help them carry out their ideas, said it has attracted 1,600 people to events it has held, and it has connected at least 20 nurses to business mentors. …
“These programs strive to put nurses on equal footing with other professions, including doctors. … Some who follow innovation in health care say nurses represent a relatively untapped reservoir of expertise about improving patient care. …
“McLaughlin calls her device ‘Lang lock,’ after her maiden name. The rounded device connects tubing to an IV catheter with a single twist, and it has one flat side to make the needle approach the skin at a lower angle so it sits more securely.
“She has teamed up with Melinda J. Watman, a former nurse who later got an MBA and went into business. … NU has been helping them to protect their intellectual property and study the market.”
More at the Boston Globe, here.
For various reasons, I’ve spent a lot of time around a lot of nurses so this story makes perfect sense to me. Nurses spend so much time working with patients and have so much compassion for them, I can absolutely see that they would want to find new ways to solve recurring problems.
The few times I’ve been in the hospital (for childbirth, for cancer), I have felt so much love for nurses.
I hope to see this device in action. Anyone that’s ever put an IV in an infant knows how fragile those sites can be.
Poor nurse, poor little tykes!