MedTech Week warmly welcomed in Umeå

After the well-attended launch of MedTech Week in Uppsala it was interesting for MedTech4Health’s roving representatives Kristina Svensson and Lena Strömberg to attend Umeå’s event on Thursday 15th June.

Good weather and good humour

The weather was good and the streets of Sweden’s northern city were thronged with people. It has to be said that it wasn’t just the weather or MedTech Week that drew folk into the streets. This date was also earmarked for celebrating school graduation and many people were doing just that. The venue for MedTech4Helth’s event, Rex (the house with gables and towers in the picture above) is centrally located – perfect to enable people to participate. Just this Thursday, though, the student celebrations attracted more attention.

In his opening welcome, local co-ordinator Ronnie Lundström explained the schedule clash. It was due to MedTech Week being a European wide event and so unable to take account of local events. The clash of schedules was in one way unfortunate because we lost a number of attendants. Some 20 people had apologised to Ronnie that they could not come because of family graduation events. On the other hand the town was in good humour, something that was certainly infectious. We keep our fingers crossed and hope that some of the partying youngsters now leaving school will choose medical technology for their futures.

CMTF mixed mingling and lecturing

The day was organised by MedTech4Health’s northern node, the Centre for Medical Technology and Physics (CMTF). In his presentation, CMTF Manager Per Hallberg compared CMTF to a steam locomotive. For many years it has pulled medical technology forward in the region. One factor in its success has always been that it is placed at a hospital. When healthcare personnel pass through the building on a daily basis, co-operation is made easier. Per stressed though that they could not take it easy but were in continual development. He was able to share with us the good news that he had just heard they had been granted SEK 4.65 million in funds from Tillväxtverket. Together with other financing this amounts to SEK 9.3 million. Congratulations!

Lectures and presentations

Among the lectures and presentations attendants heard about digitalisation and its effect on healthcare from County Council Director Anders Sylvan. Nicklas Sandström and Jenny Eklund presented VLL Innovation AB. (VLL stands for Västerbottens läns landsting – the County Council of Västerbotten Province.) VLL Innovation seeks to build partnerships between healthcare and business in the area. Malin Hollmark presented Swedish Medtech, Kristina Svensson MedTech4Health and Lena Strömberg the IMPACT programme. Lena has recently taken chrge of the IMPACT programme, which seeks to receive more applications and have more accepted projects win Horizon2020 financing from the EU.

The day was organised something like a cocktail party interspersed with lectures and presentations. The presentations were interesting and educative. Still, it was probably the opportunity to mingle, talk informally and network with representatives from local businesses that was of most value to  participants. The businesses were presented in brief interviews from the stage by Jenny Ferry. They were Likvor Ab, Gate 88, Innovation +, Diacom Port Ab, Any Mo, MTFoU, Medicevent, Protecta medical, Uminova Innovation/Biotech Umeå/EEN/UBI, Nordic Telemedicin Center.

This is a summary translation of the longer Swedish language article by Kristina Svensson which you can read here. Kristina illustrated that article with more of her photos from the event.