Mihir receives Young Engineer of the Year accolade

Mihir Sheth, an Improvement & Innovation Fellow at Oxford University Hospitals (OUH), has been named as one of five winners of the prestigious Young Engineer of the Year award.

He received the award and a £3,000 prize in London on Thursday 13 July following an announcement earlier this month about this year's winners of the Royal Academy of Engineering Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year competition, awarded by the Academy with support from the Worshipful Company of Engineers.

Mihir said: "I'm honoured that this award recognises the value of needs-led innovation and Quality Improvement in healthcare. At a time when everyone in the hospital is working above and beyond, this reinforces the importance of developing solutions where the voices of patients and healthcare providers and engineers are included from the very beginning stages, in order to reduce the overall burden of a new innovation.

"I'm extremely grateful for the support, encouragement, and creative insight of my colleagues and mentors at OUH – in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU), Complex Medicine Unit (CMU), Stroke Unit, Emergency Assessment Unit (EAU), Infection Prevention & Control (IPC), and the senior leadership team.

"Together, we are developing multiple novel OUH-specific solutions – from easier and less painful methods to cannulate newborn babies in NICU, to saving nurses’ time looking for drug cupboard keys, to reducing the duration of catheters in patients."

Mihir is developing the StimSprit device to reduce the amount of time which patients spend on ventilators. It is a non-invasive electrical muscle stimulator designed to prevent diaphragm atrophy.

As an Improvement & Innovation Fellow at OUH, he has worked alongside colleagues to co-develop and implement innovations, for example to make it easier to cannulate babies in NICU and a simplified process to better track urinary catheters and to reduce the amount of time which patients have urinary catheters.