Rinicare Ltd.

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is experienced by 12% of patients following surgery and in up to 50% of patients following cardiac surgery. It is associated with an increased risk of death and prolonged stay in critical care after surgery. In addition to the patient impact, AKI costs the NHS alone between £434m and £620m per year.
One way that AKI is diagnosed is by looking at a patient's urine output and checking how much is produced over time. If this value is too low for a patient, they are diagnosed with oliguria. Too many of these oliguria events leads to a diagnosis of AKI. The product to be tested (Stability UO) aims to reduce the number of patients who suffer three or more oliguria events after surgery by processing the data entered by the care team and providing the care team with additional information about the patient's risk of oliguria over the next six hours.
Patients over 18 who present at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust for non-emergency cardiac surgery will be screened and asked to consent to be randomised as part of the trial. Patients undergoing certain operations and those with unsuitable medical history (e.g. patients being treated for dialysis) will not be invited to participate. The randomisation will determine if their care team has access to the Stability UO software after surgery. While the care team looks after the patients in the cardiothoracic critical care unit (CTCCU) after surgery, they will enter that the patient's weight and amount of urine passed each hour into the software and review the output. The primary questions the study will answer is if there is a difference between number of oliguria events between the two groups of patients.
The study is funded by the device manufacturer: Rinicare Ltd.

Rinicare Ltd, a Lancaster-based SME, and University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay Trust (UHMB) will collaborate on a research study to determine the feasibility, suitability, and acceptability of the Rinicare developed SAFE (System to Avoid Fall Events) fall prevention and detection system in a hospital environment. The study is designed to determine if the implementation of the SAFE system will help clinicians to prevent in-patient falls from hospital beds. In-patient falls are a serious problem with more than 245,000 incidents reports in 2015-2016. 77% of these falls involve a patient over the age of 65, and the injuries patients suffer due to falls is estimated by NICE to cost the NHS £2.3B annually. This study will test the performance of the SAFE technologies against the current interventions to prevent falls, and it will investigate the impact of the SAFE technology on the workflow of the carers.
The SAFE study is designed as a comparison study combining a descriptive, quantitative methodology measuring the number of fall events with a normative analysis of the qualitative aspects experienced by the clinicians using the SAFE system during the project period.
The primary research objective of this study is to determine if the implementation of the SAFE system will quantifiably reduce the number of fall events in the ward compared to a similar control period. The secondary research objective is to determine if the SAFE system has a positive or a negative impact on the ward staff's workflow, i.e. the ability of the ward staff to provide care to the patients.