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Today is European Antibiotic Awareness Day. Tackling the era of superbugs should be a team sport. Physicians, companies, foundations and the MedTech industry all want to play their part.

When the European Commission published its secondary report on patient safety, it made me wonder why advanced wound care is not higher on the patient safety agenda at EU and national levels? Not that it’s a competition, but the incidence of wounds in the EU is approximately 4 million (!), which is on par with cancer (3,9 mill), cerebrovascular disease (3,9 mill), and diabetes (2 mill.).

The wound care debated has progressed for sure, but there’s much more do to be done to make sure than wound care in Europe gets the attention it deserves.

The EU’s on the right track, but…

Editors’ Note: This post is part of a series on Consumerisation of Care. Follow the conversation and learn from industry experts using the Twitter hashtag #mtf2014. Digital technologies are changing how companies innovate, interact and do business. Consumer industries such as retail, electronics, and telecommunications already use digital technologies to more closely connect to customers, better […]

The WHO has been raising the ‘threat level’ on this issue progressively each year for the last decade, with individual disease reports highlighting the emerging threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). This year’s report however highlights this pandemic like never before, demonstrating it’s global nature and its profound impact on health and economics. I’m a cardiologist and the report speaks to me – actually it screams out loud: “We need to get our act together”.

The discussion over superbugs moved center stage earlier this month when British Prime Minister David Cameron launched a global review of the crisis. “If we fail to act, we are looking at an almost unthinkable scenario where antibiotics no longer work and we are cast back into the dark ages of medicine where treatable infections […]

MedTech is transforming the world in which we live; we are healthier and more able than ever before. However, there are still a number of fundamental challenges that we face both locally and globally. The launch of the Longitude Prize 2014, with it’s £10 million prize fund, is seeking solutions to some of these fundamental scientific challenges. Antibiotics resistance, paralysis and dementia are on the shortlist of issues that could reap a £10m research windfall. The MedTech community has a vital and integral role to play, harnessing its power to innovate and accelerate towards the winning solutions!

A few years ago I was attending a conference on biologics manufacturing and the keynote speaker said their industry was lagging in implementing modern microbiological tools whereas the beer industry was way ahead. I was glad there were no clinical microbiologists in the room!

When most people think about chronic conditions, certain disease areas come to mind – diabetes, heart disease, obesity, asthma, allergies…the list goes on.  However, it is unlikely that you think about chronic wounds as being part of that list.  Why is that?  Given that wounds impact 4 million Europeans per year (more than cancer and […]

The work we do at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art in London focuses on developing projects with a strong emphasis on identifying and understanding everyday situations that people have difficulty with.  Our approach is inclusive: we work with many ‘users’ of a product, service or system in order […]