This week, our nation will pay special tribute to the endless contributions of nurses in celebration of National Nurses Week.
While nurses are most often recognized for their irreplaceable role in providing quality patient care, we also wish to acknowledge their significant contributions to medical technology innovation.
For medical manufacturers, taking nurses' feedback into account at every point in the development process is key to creating technologies that are both effective in addressing patient care needs and intuitive for clinicians to use.
One prime example of how nurses have influenced medical technology is in the development of 3M Tegaderm transparent film dressings.
According to 3M Corporate Scientist Steve Heinecke, the best innovation stems from understanding the customer's needs. "It's critical to gain customer insights at the onset of product development," said Mr. Heinecke. "Our ability to create new products is worthless if they are not able to address the customer's needs."
Mr. Heinecke understood that premise when he started at 3M in the 1970s. After following critical care nurses on their daily rounds, he recognized that the practice of applying gauze and tape around the patient's catheter insertion site was time-consuming, tedious, and difficult to perform it in a way that allowed visibility of the site without removing the tape.
In addition, 3M invited clinicians to user panels to foster a candid dialogue about their clinical needs. All of these insights led to the invention of Tegaderm transparent film dressings, which gave nurses the ability to monitor the insertion site for signs of complications without lifting the dressing.
"During our research, not a single nurse had asked for a transparent dressing. But when we showed them the transparent dressings and how easy they were to apply, they realized this had been what was missing," recalled Mr. Heinecke.
Since the introduction of Tegaderm dressings 35 years ago, 3M has continued collaborating with clinicians to help evolve the portfolio into a broad array of dressings for I.V. securement and wound care.
As we celebrate nurses this week and honor their tireless work serving patients day in and day out, we also thank them for their collaboration and commitment to improving care processes and technology. Without their drive for improvement and critical input, we wouldn't have the innovative medical technologies we have today. We look forward to continuing this partnership to further improve patient care.
About the Author
Pat Parks, MD, PhD is the medical director for 3M Critical and Chronic Care Solutions Division. He is also an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Minnesota. His passion and responsibilities include research and technologies related to catheter related bloodstream infections and wound healing.