The 32nd Korea International Medical & Hospital Equipment Show held in Seoul from 17 to 20 March showcased Korea’s important medical equipment industry.

Over the years, KIMES has grown into one of the major trade shows in Asia. This year, the event gathered more than 73,000 visitors over 38,808 square meters of exhibition space. One of its main advantages is that it acts as a showcase for Korea’s particularly strong medical equipment industry. Indeed, out of the 1,152 companies from 37 countries who were exhibiting this year, 548 were Korean manufacturers and the show provided an ideal setting for highlighting the increasingly important role played by leading Korean companies such as Samsung, Listem, JW Medical, DK Medical, BIT Computer and Alpinion to name but a few.
As a platform enabling Korea’s medical device industry to show its latest equipment and technology alongside leading global players like GE, Fuji, Shimadzu and Hitachi, KIMES has succeeded in attracting numerous contingents of foreign visitors especially from the Asia region who have a strong purchasing power, including officials in medical institutions and hospitals, radiologists, medical laboratory specialists, pharmacists and emergency medical personnel. The number of foreign visitors has increased significantly this year, reaching 3563 medical professionals from 86 countries, a growth of 17.2% versus 2015. Over the last 5 years, the total of foreign visitors has grown by 184% compared with 19% for domestic visitors. Unsurprisingly, China is top of the list accounting for more than 30% of the total of foreign visitors, followed by South East Asia with nearly 20% and Japan.
A post show survey of exhibitors conducted by the organizers showed a majority of them satisfied with the results of their participation and over 70% committing to exhibit again in 2017.

A study led by King’s College London and the University of Southampton has shown that a higher registered nurse to patient ratio is linked to a reduced risk of inpatient death.
The study of staffing levels in NHS hospitals found that in trusts where registered nurses had six or fewer patients to care for, the death rate for patients with medical conditions was 20 per cent lower than in those where they had more than 10. Hospitals with more doctors per bed also had lower death rates but hospitals with more unregistered nursing support workers may have had higher death rates.
The study, by researchers from King’s College London, the University of Southampton, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm and the New York School of Medicine, analysed two measures over two years (2009-11): the number of beds per registered nurse, doctor, and healthcare support worker in 137 acute care trusts; and the number of patients per ward nurse, drawn from a survey of just under 3000 registered nurses in a nationally representative sample of 31 of these trusts (46 hospitals and 401 wards).
They also calculated the predicted number of deaths for medical and surgical inpatients, taking account of influential factors, such as age, other underlying conditions, and number of emergency admissions during the previous 12 months.
Among patients admitted to medical, wards, higher death rates were associated with higher numbers of occupied beds for each registered nurse and for each doctor employed by the trust. By contrast, higher numbers of healthcare support workers were associated with higher rates of inpatient death.
When all staff groups were included in the statistical analysis of all 137 trusts, the associations remained significant only for doctors and healthcare support workers.
But analysis focussing on nurses actually working on wards of the subsidiary group of 31 trusts showed that the death rate was 20 per cent lower in those where each registered nurse cared for an average of six or fewer medical inpatients than in trusts were each registered nurse cared for 10 or more. These associations remained significant after further statistical analysis.
The results on surgical wards were similar, with higher registered nurse to patient ratios associated with a 17 per cent lower inpatient death rate.
The registered nurse headcount varied by as much as a factor of four between those at the top and bottom of the staffing scale. Even after taking account of all nursing staff, this variation only dropped to a threefold difference between those with the highest and lowest nurse headcounts.

Kings College London http://tinyurl.com/hujb9hc

Older people are particularly at risk of water-loss dehydration – which is caused by not drinking enough fluid. It can lead to poor health outcomes such as disability and even death.
The best test for diagnosing dehydration, known as a serum osmolality test, is expensive and not currently viable for wide-scale NHS screening.
But new research published recently reveals how routine blood tests for sodium, potassium, urea and glucose could be used to screen for dehydration.
By putting the results of these tests through an osmolarity equation’, health professionals can tell whether an older person is drinking enough fluid.
Lead researcher Dr Lee Hooper from UEA’s Norwich Medical School said: ‘Around 20 per cent of older people living in residential care are dehydrated, and that figure rises to around 40 per cent among those admitted to hospital.
‘Older people often drink less than younger people for a variety of reasons. Loss of routine and fewer social contacts can reduce drinking. In some cases older people choose to drink less as getting to the toilet can be more difficult and take longer. It can be physically difficult to make, carry and drink a cup of tea when you get older – especially if you need a zimmer frame to walk about. And older people tend not to feel thirsty when they drink too little so their bodies don’t warn them to start drinking.
‘On top of all that – as our kidneys get older we are less able to concentrate our urine to preserve fluid, so the body’s ability to regulate its fluid balance slowly reduces.
‘Dehydration often goes unnoticed by carers, but it can lead to increased risk of hospital admission, urinary tract infections, disability and even death.
‘A serum osmolality test measures the freezing point of blood serum to show how concentrated a sample of blood is. People’s blood becomes more concentrated as they become dehydrated.
‘But it is an expensive and time consuming procedure – and clinical laboratories would not be able to handle routine screening. Simpler tests such as urine measurements, which appear to work well in children and young adults, do not work in older adults.
‘When our blood becomes more concentrated, as we become dehydrated, concentrations of serum sodium, potassium, urea and glucose rise. Many blood tests routinely measured in older people already check for all of these, and assess them independently.
‘We wanted to test whether results from routine tests for sodium, potassium, urea and glucose could be used together to accurately screen for dehydration by using a simple mathematical equation.
‘There are a number of different equations already being used, but they vary considerably from each other, and it wasn’t known which were most useful for elderly people. We wanted to find a universal equation which would be accurate for a broad range of elderly people including people with conditions such as diabetes.’
The research team studied 595 people over age 65 – including those who were healthy and lived independently, frail people living in residential care, and those in hospital. The group also spanned several European countries and took into account those with poor renal function and diabetes.
They assessed the diagnostic accuracy of 39 different equations, and compared the results to directly measured serum osmolality.
They found that an osmolarity equation described by Khajuria and Krahn had greatest universal accuracy – across healthy and frail older people, those in and out of hospital, with and without diabetes, with and without poor renal function, at all levels of dehydration and in men and women.
Dr Hooper said: ‘We propose that clinical laboratories use this equation to report on hydration status of older people when reporting blood test results that include sodium, potassium, urea and glucose. We hope our findings will lead to pragmatic screening in older people to allow early identification of dehydration. This would help doctors, nurses and carers support older people to increase their fluid intake.’

University of East Angliahttp://tinyurl.com/hmefojk

A large registry study led from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet sheds new light on the much debated issue of transfusions with stored blood. The study shows that the use of stored blood units does not influence patient outcomes after heart surgery.
In Sweden and most other western countries, blood units can be stored for as long as 6 weeks before being transfused. However, a high-profile publication in 2008, which claimed that storage for a mere 14 days or more was unsafe for heart surgery, has caused confusion and anxiety at hospital clinics worldwide.
‘There have literally been hundreds of studies conducted on this topic the past five or six years, none of which have been able to provide a definitive answer’, says senior author Gustaf Edgren , MD, Associate Professor at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics .
To tackle the problem at its roots, Dr. Gustaf Edgren and his research team performed a large-scale study of almost 50,000 patients in Sweden over a 16-year period. The study was made possible by linking a number of high-quality health registries, which allowed researchers to include all heart surgery patients in Sweden during the study period, with complete information about all blood transfusions administered together with clinical details about the patients. The cohort included patients receiving transfusions with blood that had been stored between 14 and 42 days.
‘This study is by far the largest investigation focusing on the issue of blood storage in this very sensitive patient group, and we find absolutely no hint of negative health effects associated with stored blood’, says lead study-author Ulrik Sartipy, a cardiac surgeon and associate professor at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery .
‘Thanks to these unique health registers we have been able to provide very firm reassurance that the current blood storage practices are safe,’ says Gustaf Edgren.

Karolinska Institutet http://tinyurl.com/zudvdfb

The microbiome of patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) at a hospital differs dramatically from that of healthy patients, according to a new study. Researchers analysing microbial taxa in ICU patients’ guts, mouth and skin reported finding dysbiosis, or a bacterial imbalance, that worsened during a patient’s stay in the hospital. Compared to healthy people, ICU patients had depleted populations of commensal, health-promoting microbes and higher counts of bacterial taxa with pathogenic strains – leaving patients vulnerable to hospital-acquired infections that may lead to sepsis, organ failure and potentially death.
What makes a gut microbiome healthy or not remains poorly defined in the field. Nonetheless, researchers suspect that critical illness requiring a stay in the ICU is associated with the loss of bacteria that help keep a person healthy. The new study, which prospectively monitored and tracked changes in bacterial makeup, delivers evidence for that hypothesis.
‘The results were what we feared them to be,’ says study leader Paul Wischmeyer, an anesthesiologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. ‘We saw a massive depletion of normal, health-promoting species.’
Wischmeyer notes that treatments used in the ICU – including courses of powerful antibiotics, medicines to sustain blood pressure, and lack of nutrition – can reduce the population of known healthy bacteria. An understanding of how those changes affect patient outcomes could guide the development of targeted interventions to restore bacterial balance, which in turn could reduce the risk of infection by dangerous pathogens.
Previous studies have tracked microbiome changes in individual or small numbers of critically ill patients, but Wischmeyer and his collaborators analysed skin, stool, and oral samples from 115 ICU patients across four hospitals in the United States and Canada. They analysed bacterial populations in the samples twice – once 48 hours after admission, and again after 10 days in the ICU (or when the patient was discharged). They also recorded what the patients ate, what treatments patients received, and what infections patients incurred.
The researchers compared their data to data collected from a healthy subset of people who participated in the American Gut project dataset. (American Gut is a crowd-sourced project aimed at characterizing the human microbiome by the Rob Knight Lab at the University of California San Diego.) They reported that samples from ICU patients showed lower levels of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes bacteria, two of the largest groups of microbes in the gut, and higher abundances of Proteobacteria, which include many pathogens.
Wischmeyer was surprised by how quickly the microbiome changed in the patients. ‘We saw the rapid rise of organisms clearly associated with disease,’ he says. ‘In some cases, those organisms became 95 percent of the entire gut flora – all made up of one pathogenic taxa – within days of admission to the ICU. That was really striking.’ Notably, the researchers reported that some of the patient microbiomes, even at the time of admission, resembled the microbiomes of corpses. ‘That happened in more people than we would like to have seen,’ he says.
American Society of Microbiology http://tinyurl.com/hz98ug9