In our latest #OurEntrepreneurs profile we meet cohort 8 Clinical Entrepreneur Jerome Condry, Anaesthetics Clinical Fellow.  

Tell us a bit about yourself 

I am an Anaesthetics Clinical Fellow at Southmead Hospital with an interest in engineering out errors in our clinical practice. For the past 4 years I have been working with the Royal United Hospital and Engineers at the University of Bath to develop novel technologies to improve the care we deliver to our patients in Anaesthetics and Critical Care.

I am currently developing 3 separate new technologies, with my first invention now ready to be tested in a clinical trial.

Tell us about your innovation and the challenge you aim to address within the NHS? 

My invention aims to make caring for some of the most critically unwell prone patients in our Intensive Care Units safer. It is an inflatable positioning device designed to allow staff to position proned patients on intensive care with minimal manual handling requirement.  This device aims to reduce injuries to patients as a result of being proned, reduce complication rates, save 10 hours of staff time per proned patient per day, and reduce manual handling injuries to staff as a result of caring for these patients.  

Proning is the medical term for caring for an intubated, ventilated patient while they lie on their front. It is a treatment for patients admitted to Intensive Care with severe lung injury and has been shown to improve mortality by 17%. 16,500 patients annually are suitable for proning in the UK alone. It is not without complications, including pressure sores, nerve, and organ injuries and if a patient survives their stay on ICU, these complications have an enormous effect on their ability to recover and return to good health. Pressure injuries from proning have been identified by the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine as a cause of national concern in their safety bulletin.  

To minimise the risk of these complications, patients are repositioned every 2-4 hours. This takes around 5 staff 30 minutes to complete, and much longer if full PPE is required, with a significant manual handling load and drain on ICU staff from other areas of the department.  

My device aims to reduce the incidence of complications from proning by allowing bespoke positioning while the patient is proned and avoiding delays to repositioning by significantly simplifying the process, reducing time taken by 10-15 minutes, and the number of staff required from 5 to 2.  

 

Why did you apply to join the programme, and what are you most looking forward to?

I heard about the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme through my local Health Innovation Network, who I have been working with to develop my projects over the last 4 years. I applied to learn from the experiences of the mentors and entrepreneurs on the programme who have gone through the same challenges as me before. I’m most looking forward to working with a mentor to develop my projects further, including how to succeed and avoid future pitfalls.  

I hope the programme will provide me with the skills to succeed in bringing new devices to the NHS to allow us to provide better care to our patients. 

What are your ambitions for the next year?

In the next year I will design and initiate my first national clinical trial, testing my device in Intensive Cares around the country.   

Why do you think innovation is important in healthcare?

Innovation is fundamental to healthcare. It allows us to provide the best possible care to a population with constantly changing healthcare needs, and use new and developing technologies to improve the systems we work in to provide healthcare as efficiently and safely as possible. 

How can we find out more?

Please contact me at jerome.condry@nhs.net to learn more about my innovation or if you are interested in getting involved.