Watch this video to see how we surprised the winners with a cream cake.
This year's Innovation Award for Sustainability goes to Jasper Stevens, researcher at Pharmacology. Jasper wants to make kidney function measurement in the hospital more sustainable. Currently, two radioactive substances are used for this. Together with colleagues from Internal Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology, Jasper is developing a substance for kidney function measurement that is not radioactive. This way, patients and staff are no longer exposed to the radioactivity. Also, this substance does not have to be transported, stored and disposed of separately, which is more sustainable and cheaper.
More and more young doctors and students are struggling with emotional exhaustion and burn-out symptoms. Psychologist and researcher Johanna Schönrock-Adema wants to tackle this problem with a musical course for medical students. By evoking emotions with music, students will learn to recognise their emotions and deal with them constructively and healthily. She won the Innovation Award for Education with this idea.
The winner of the Innovation Award for Care is nurse Ina Meijer-van der Leest. She works in Intensive Care and she has an idea for who are too weak to move or patients on a ventilator to help them communicate. By looking at pictograms on a computer that the patient controls with his eyes, the patient can let the nurse or doctor know what he wants to say or ask. It also allows the patient to communicate better with family and loved ones.
Researcher Pieter van der Zaag and his colleagues have discovered a method to use imaging and artificial intelligence to determine the borderline areas of a tumour. They have applied for a patent for this, so they cannot give much more information about it yet. The researchers want to combine their method with another innovation, also developed in Groningen, in which drugs are activated very locally using light. They hope to be able to show that the two methods can be combined to treat bacterial infections during operations on, for example, knees or hips.
With the annual Innovation Awards, UMCG stimulates innovative ideas from employees. From no fewer than 50 entries, a jury chose four prize winners: in the fields of Care, Research, Education & Training and Sustainability. The winners of the Innovation Prizes will each receive 50,000 euros to realise their idea. In doing so, they will receive support from the UMCG Innovation Center.
