To improve patients’ empowerment by selfconnection in home parenteral nutrition

Abstract

One promising approach for patients who need parenteral nutrition to live an almost normal life, is to provide extra-hospital therapy. This therapy is supported by an ambulatory care service whose staff connects and disconnects the nutritional fluid day by day. The nutrition therapy takes a long time every day and studies show that this therapy significantly disturbs patients’ daily life. Although home parenteral nutrition is part of the range of services provided by the statutory health insurance (German GKV), it is also expensive in the long run. Therefore, the cost-effectiveness of this form of therapy is constantly reviewed on an individual basis. Aim of this project is to enable a more autonomous life for patients by self-determined in between disconnection and connection of the therapy independently of the ambulatory care service. It has to be taken into account that any interruption of the nutrition process poses health risks to the patient, e.g. if air bubbles or bio contaminants enter the tube system. Flushing with saline solution before and after connecting is therefore an elementary component of the nutrition process. The redesigning of the connecting/disconnecting system and the subsequent development of an automated port flushing system integrated into a mobile feeding pump to realize a safe interruption of the therapy is the overall goal of the project. This paper deals with redesigning the connecting system. After having analysed group discussions, detected impact factors are used as basis of an experimental setup to get the final requirements for redesigning the connector system. The experimental study is done according to the rules of Design of Experimental (DoE). DoE is a statistical method to determine the optimal number of tests by using a complete factorial design. Two repetitions of the tests were carried out to analyse the significance of the impact factors by ANOVA (Analysis of Variance).

Keywords

• home care
• parenteral nutrition
• patients’ empowerment
• product development