Esther McVey: Proud of Wirral’s winning innovative team

Jun 15 2011 Heswall News

Esther McVey: Proud of Wirral’s winning innovative team

LAST WEEK I attended the Medical Futures Innovation Awards, invited by Wirral resident Prof Susan Higham.

She and her team from Liverpool University had been nominated for Best Innovation in Patient Engagement in the Dental & Oral Innovation Awards for their invention iDENTifi and won it.

Their invention is a digital camera system that can be used in a dental practice to take close up images of patient’s teeth.

The images are relayed wirelessly to a handheld tablet device to provide immediate information to patients and dentists. All in all, it provides for a preventive dental management.

IDENTifi has been successfully part licensed to a global commercial product partner and the judges believed it is set to be a commercial success.

The Future Awards are a unique British invention of their own, and have now become Europe’s largest showcase of early-stage innovation of health care, conceived from those on the front line of delivering care.

The awards are run on a not-for-profit basis with the intention of bringing inventions to the market place.

So how impressed was I to be among the best medical inventors in the world and more than that to be with the winning Wirral team?

Few might know, but Merseyside is a science centre, with the universities and hospitals at the heart of it.

Our region’s “knowledge economy” is estimated to be worth £4.bn and is set to grow further, aided by the government’s £451m investment into the Royal Liverpool Hospital with the vision to develop a bio-campus, so others, like the IDENTifi team, can develop and create great inventions.

For more information go to www.medicalfutures.co.uk