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Nurse Anesthetist Wins ANA Innovation Honors With First-of-its-Kind Airway Tool

Analysis  |  By Carol Davis  
   March 10, 2023

Inventor saw a gap in available and effective airway management tools for patients who suffer breathing complications.

A nurse anesthetist who leads a team that developed a device she invented, the McMurray Enhanced Airway (MEA), is the Nurse-led Team Award winner of the 2023 ANA Innovation Awards given by the American Nurses Association (ANA).

The ANA Innovation Awards highlight, recognize, and celebrate exemplary nurse innovators who improve patient safety and health outcomes. The award includes a $50,000 prize earmarked for further product advancements.

Roxanne McMurray, DNP, APRN, CRNA, and her team with McMurray Medical, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, developed the breathing tool to maintain adequate ventilation for surgery or other medical procedures.

Unlike other airway devices, the MEA’s longer flexible tubing reaches beyond the tongue to quickly stent open a patient’s airway, easing ventilation and oxygenation. It can be inserted quickly and easily without requiring special patient positioning or accessories.

The MEA also can be attached to an anesthesia circuit or resuscitator bag.

“New airway management tools are needed to help today’s patients breathe better during and after anesthesia is administered, especially in ambulatory and outpatient surgery centers and non-operating room procedures,” McMurray said. “The McMurray Enhanced Airway meets these needs and more in a significant way.”

Today’s patients, particularly those who are older, obese, or have sleep apnea, often have an increased risk of upper airway obstruction, according to McMurray Medical.

McMurray and her team saw a gap in available and effective airway management tools for patients who suffered from breathing complications, which led to the creation of the first-of-its-kind MEA.

“The 2023 ANA Innovation Award winners have built clinical solutions for complex healthcare challenges. Roxanne … advanced care and the resources being delivered, while simultaneously improving health quality for patients,” said Oriana Beaudet, DNP, RN, PHN, the ANA’s vice president of nursing innovation. “Advancing nurse-led solutions that create sustainable cost-effective solutions across healthcare is good business, driven by purpose and mission.”

“Nurses advance health through their work as clinicians, scientists, entrepreneurs, researchers, product designers, policy leaders, in advanced practice, as community organizers, and by providing direct care across our country in hospitals, long term care, hospice, ambulatory settings, schools, and numerous public health settings,” Beaudet said. “It’s time the innovative work of nurses is recognized.”

“Advancing nurse-led solutions that create sustainable cost-effective solutions across healthcare is good business, driven by purpose and mission.”

Carol Davis is the Nursing Editor at HealthLeaders, an HCPro brand.


KEY TAKEAWAYS

Patients who are older, obese, or have sleep apnea often have an increased risk of upper airway obstruction.

The MEA’s longer flexible tubing reaches beyond the tongue to quickly stent open a patient’s airway.

The tool requires no special patient positioning or accessories.

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