Owen Mumford has been recognised as a winner of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, Innovation 2017, the UK’s highest accolade for business success.
The award recognises organisations showing outstanding and/or sustained commercial success over a period of years.
The winners were chosen by the Queen, on advice of the former Prime Minister, David Cameron and were announced on 21 April, the Queen’s birthday.
Owen Mumford received the Award for Innovation in recognition of the new innovations in medical device design and manufacturing the company has developed to improve quality of life, encourage adherence to treatment, and reduce healthcare costs.
With a 65-year history of medical device firsts, Owen Mumford offers innovations in diagnostic sampling to drug delivery from a broad base of proven self-injection and blood sampling platform devices and intellectual property.
Owen Mumford’s extensive research, design and manufacturing capabilities produce leading-class medical devices that are used by a worldwide audience – with over 85% of their products exported to more than 60 countries.
The award acknowledged developments in injection pen needles, specifically the Unifine Pentips Plus.
The global increase in diabetes has seen a concurrent increase in demand for pen devices with needles for injection.
While single use of the pen needle is the recommendation, it is difficult to effectively educate patients about best practice and the ease of pen needle removal and disposal is a major barrier to compliance.
The company’s all-in-one pen needle is an integrated device with two chambers, one containing a new pen needle, the other providing a more convenient removal chamber for interim disposal.
The development enables users to fit a new needle easily and dispose of the old one responsibly.
Following development of the innovation, Owen Mumford conducted a user evaluation study and identified that adherence in using a new pen needle for each injection increased by 61% when compared to needle change behaviour with their previous-standard pen needle.
Commercially, sales of the device have increased by 52% over the past two years.
“Receiving our Queen’s Award for Innovation is particularly rewarding as it highlights how everything we do at Owen Mumford is about making a world of difference,” said managing director, Jarl Severn.
“Through our work, we seek to improve quality of life, encourage adherence to treatment and reduce healthcare costs.
“We are delighted that our 65-year history of world firsts in device solutions have been recognised by the former Prime Minister and the Queen.”
