HEALTHCARE ESTATES 2016
be to award points to children and their avatar for, for instance, complying with a medication regime or a healthy diet. The Alder Hey Innovation Hub is also ‘looking at virtual reality and 3D’. David Powell elaborated: “An example of this is within the operating theatres.”
Virtual reality in the operating theatre Taking this forward, David Powell explained that the hospital’s project team had worked closely with the Virtual Engineering Centre (which is ‘underpinned’ by the University of Liverpool), harnessing the facilities of a large ‘3D cinema’ facility at the Science & Technology Facilities Council’s Hartree Laboratory at Daresbury in Warrington. One of the many other users of the facility is luxury British car manufacturer, Bentley Motors, which has used the immersive and virtual reality technology on offer to help create new vehicle designs ‘virtually’, in the process speeding up its prototyping and production.
The speaker said: “We have recently taken CT image files of the heart to the Daresbury VR 3D cinema, and, using the technology there, one of the Trust’s cardiac surgeons has been able to effectively ‘walk around’ inside a patient’s heart and see where the defects are in detail. The surgeon was able to ‘tour’ the heart via virtual reality.”
3D printing
In parallel, David Powell explained, the hospital was contacted by a 3D printing company, 3D LifePrints, making 3D prosthetic ‘models’, whose staff are now ‘embedded’ in the Innovation Hub at Alder Hey, and are now producing 3D prints for pre-operative planning.
Clinical nurse specialist for Resus, Russell Ashworth, during a teaching session with staff.
He added: “The orthopods, for example, have now experimented with making the items from a range of materials – from inexpensive plastics, to silicon. The goal is to identify the optimal ways to produce these components in 3D, both to a high standard, and at a reasonable cost, for the medical sector’s wider benefit.”
Digital company collaboration The Innovation Hub had also recently collaborated with a local digital company to set up a joint venture company, with investment backing from a venture capitalist. “One early concept being looked at,” David Powell explained, “is the development of a system to identify and monitor asthma symptoms at home to enable people to self-manage mild symptoms and seek medical help if they worsen. The team is also working with young people to develop an ‘app’ that will help children with depression and their carers to monitor their mood, to enable early intervention before their condition deteriorates to a serious situation.”
‘Hackathons’
A young oncology patient is happy to test out some of the virtual reality equipment.
40 Health Estate Journal April 2017
In all this development and R&D work, David Powell explained, the input from ‘Hackathon’ events (the name had been ‘picked up’ from the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology) had proven invaluable. He said: “The way that the Hackathons work is to get patients, parents, nurses, doctors, and support staff to present a tricky problem. The audience, which includes other patients and staff, partners from the local scientific and digital industries, plus university teams, then gathers together in teams and ‘invents a solution to the problem’.” He continued: “We have now held these Hackathons twice – once in November 2015 and, more recently, we held a Healthy Living Hackathon in the Alder Hey parkland.” This saw such questions raised as ‘How do you get teenage girls into exercise when the infrastructure isn’t there and they are
doing all sorts of other things?’, and ‘How do you get kids to cycle with crash helmets on to prevent head injuries?’ At this point, looking more broadly at the hospital’s role in the ‘Healthy Living agenda’, David Powell said: “The site here covers some 20 hectares; the hospital itself sits on five, and there is the opportunity for us to develop the rest of the site. The park itself was council- owned. It was tired, with not much happening in it. We are now working with the council to establish a community interest company, with our neighbours, families, and schools, and using that as a focal point to try to generate programmes of healthy living, looking at areas such as how you get kids involved in exercise and to eat better.”
Healthy food
In fact – on the latter point – every ward in the new hospital has its own kitchen and chef. David Powell said: “The idea is that when staff or parents are feeding their child they can talk to them about their diet. We are also already looking at growing vegetables etc. that can then be used in the ward-based kitchens. “Overall, we are trying to use the park as a big focal point for health, and have been looking, recently, at how to get third sector people, charities, and big enterprise involved around the idea of how you use a park for healthy living.” In concluding, he told the conference audience: “That was just a quick run-through of some of the innovation ongoing. My message to you is that you get incredible energy from doing these things, and the force is definitely there. The disappointment for me is when you build a new healthcare facility, and it is completed, all the energy may fizzle out and everybody just reverts to what they do in their day job. Luckily, this didn’t happen here. My closing message, therefore, is: Look at how you can harness all the energy and use it as a force for good. May the force be with you!”
hej
© Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust.
© Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60