It was great to meet the team again at The Maidstone and Tunbridge Well NHS Trust hospital in September who have been working with us over the past few years on the new innovation Airglove.

Initially the concept came from Paula Tinniswood who was their General Manager at the time Paula said

“I felt compelled to come up with the original concept which became Airglove in response to cancer patients needs with the aim to improve health and safety standards and deliver efficiencies in health care worldwide”.

We are delighted she thought of this brilliant idea which was brought to us by John Stedman, Chief Executive NHS Innovations South East which gave Gio Benedetti his next innovation inspiration in product design. He took this initial concept back to his design team headed up by Ian MacLatchie who then along with Gio resigned the concept into what has become Airglove today.

Paula Tinniswood – Original Concept Design

Airglove is a unique warming system developed to enable access to veins in a patient for the delivery of intravenous drugs. It gently heats the patients arm up as it forces warm air through a double walled polythene glove (see image below). The Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells team working in conjunction with ourselves and NHS Innovations South East has enabled us to bring this amazing development to the market place in early 2017. Michael Chalklin and Wayne Milsom from the EME department initially tested the Airglove prototype units with the objective to test to simulate conditions patent treatment that would be carried out to access for any potential risk to patient and/or operator/s. With Prototype 2 the outcome showed the system “was easy to use and heats the tissue effectively over the limb” and that “the temperatures are within acceptable ranges”.

Dr Syed Husain, Clinical Lead for Innovations working with Dr Leon G. D’Cruz have been instrumental with the clinical research they are working on along with Meral Hart, Clinical Audit & Innovations Manager, Keli Tomlin and Charlotte Wadey – Macmillan Lead Chemotherapy Nurses

Airglove – Final Design