Medovate – a dynamic development company with specialisms in anaesthesia, airway management, critical care, and surgery – is partnering with its UK distributor Vygon Vet to introduce its game-changing anaesthesia device SAFIRA to veterinary practice.
The Cambridge-based company will be working with Vygon Vet to bring the unique patient and clinical benefits that the technology offers in human healthcare to vets, focusing on small-animal regional anaesthesia.
SAFIRA is a revolutionary new technology that transforms regional anaesthesia into a one-person procedure. It also incorporates a unique safety solution that limits injection pressure, helping to reduce the risk of nerve injury.
In current regional anaesthesia procedures two operators are often needed, including a second operator (an assistant) who injects the anaesthetic solution at the required pressure, which relies on “feel”. This means anaesthetic solutions can be injected at unsafe pressures.
Dr. Federico Corletto, Consultant Anaesthetist from Dick White Referrals, one of the largest specialist veterinary centres in Europe, explains: “By turning regional anaesthesia into a one-person procedure, the technology also removes the challenges of communicating with an assistant regarding subjective injective pressure feel, thus removing the unpredictability of an untrained hand.”
Regional anaesthesia is an important part of small animal care and is used for many reasons in veterinary medicine, including improved quality of recovery. The use of ultrasound guided regional anaesthesia is becoming more common practice today, with the technique – which can help provide a higher level of visualisation for the practitioner – increasingly seen as a “gold standard”.
There are limitations and challenges that are not always present in the practice of adult human medicine. Nerve parathesia, for instance, is harder to ascertain in animals. Small animals such as cats also have increased sensitivity to local anaesthetics when compared with other species, necessitating much lower maximum doses be used.
Brett Hughes – Homecare and Veterinary Business Manager, Vygon UK, explains that SAFIRA has been designed to provide benefits for regional anaesthesia.
He said: “The device
infuses at 0.5ml/second, and to vets the technology offers a valuable tool that can control injection small intervals at a time. This allows the veterinary practitioner to titrate appropriately to see the anaesthesia spread around a nerve bundle. There are a significant number of regional anaesthesia blocks completed in veterinary practice per annum globally, so potentially this NHS developed device could play a major role in the future of veterinary practice.”
Developed in collaboration with consultant anaesthetists in the UK NHS, SAFIRA has been successfully launched in the human healthcare field in the USA, Australia and New Zealand, bringing to market Medovate’s first medtech innovation.
Medovate has partnered with Vygon – one of the largest independent French medical device companies – to introduce the technology across Europe, with the pioneering technology earmarked for launch into the UK market this year.
As well as expanding SAFIRA into human healthcare in markets across the globe, Medovate is now looking to extend the value of their game-changing technology to help veterinary professionals benefit from the unique benefits SAFIRA can bring to regional anaesthesia procedures.
Chris Rogers, Sales and Marketing Director at Medovate, commented: “This is a very exciting partnership with Vygon Vet that aims to evaluate how SAFIRA’s unique safety benefits can be translated into small-animal regional anaesthesia and thus introduced into wider veterinary practice.”
