Evolving needs of the medical sector

The growing population in Gulf region is all set to drive the region's healthcare and medical market. According to specialists Colliers International's report on UAE's healthcare report for fourth quarter 2013, as healthcare in UAE and the whole MENA region continues to evolve, the operational needs of providers in this sector expands and have become more complex.

The study suggests that despite challenges, this sector provides immense potential for investors on the basis of few integral factors: High population growth rates in the MENA region, introduction of compulsory healthcare services, high return on healthcare investments and heavy reliance on medicine and medical equipment. In UAE alone, the country's healthcare market is expected to reach AED 3.5bn by 2018.

Stéphane Content, sector group manager of The European Council for Plasticisers and Intermediates (ECPI), highl ighted how plas t icisers have been making PVC usable for medical applications since long. He suggested that items made of flexible PVC containing plasticisers are found in rooms and corridors of healthcare facilities globally and are part of life-saving objects such as tubing, dialysis, endotracheal, feeding and pressure monitoring, catheters, blood and urine bags, gloves, mattress covers as well as flooring and wall coverings.

Medical PVC products were originally made as replacements for rubber and glass given such benefits of low cost, safety, high performance and flexibility. Glass for centuries has been used as the most reliable items for liquid containers and syringes but plastic offers a better substitute since it can hold liquid content for longer and is nearly as transparent as glass. They have mostly been produced from polyethylene or polypropylene, which means they can be made a lot cheaper than their glass equivalents.

Improved medical polymers
Companies across the world are availing of the potential the medical sector offers for plastic products. Teknor Apex now offers comprehensive medical compounds such as TPE, PVC and plasticisers. Two global medical contract manufacturers have demonstrated the ease and precision with which tubing made from Medalist® MD-500 Series medical elastomers from Teknor Apex can be fabricated during extrusion and postextrusion or "downstream" processing, enhancing the suitability of these compounds as replacements for PVC.

"In production runs by Dunn Industries, Inc. and Pelham Plastics, Inc., Medalist-based tubing exhibited outstanding performance during extrusion, when subjected to in-line cutting to length, and in secondary operations including hole punching, tipping, printing, and insert molding," said Ross VanRoyen, senior market manager/ regulated products for the Thermoplastic Elastomer Division of Teknor Apex. These successes follow two other recent demonstrations that Medalist MD-500 Series compounds provide a practical alternative to PVC in tubing:

1) extrusion demonstration runs by American Kuhne, Inc showing the tight dimensional tolerance capability of Medalist MD-500 Series compounds for production even at high-speed (over 360 meters/min.); and 2) development by Teknor Apex of patent-pending technologies for bonding Medalist-based tubing to traditional connectors. During the past few years, Teknor Apex has steadily progressed in meeting and exceeding these requirements, as demonstrated by its global customers, including crystal clarity, kink resistance, clamp resilience, PVC-like haptics, extrusion at high speeds, sterilization by gamma irradiation or ETO, connector bonding assembly in clinical settings, and everyday handling by healthcare workers.

Dunn Industries—which specialises in medical tubing—extruded Medalist MD-500 Series compounds at its Manchester, NH facility. "The Medalist elastomers exhibited a wide processing window and maintained close tolerances," said company president Duane Dunn. "Tubing was easily cut to length in-line with extrusion. Our customers value our ability to deliver solutions around the world and Teknor Apex Medalist MD-500 series reinforces this principle."

Pelham Plastics (Pelham, NH), which specialises in custom injection moulding and assembly of medical devices, readily carried out a variety of downstream assembly techniques with tubing produced from Medalist MD-500 Series elastomers, according to John J. Mackey, President.

"The fabrication performance of tubing produced from Medalist compounds was outstanding," Mr. Mackey said. "The tubing was easy to work with even in our most innovative techniques, such as holepunching and tipping, and we were able to carry out every fabrication technique with great precision."

Compared with PVC, Medalist MD-500 Series tubing compounds exhibit comparable crystal clarity and mechanical properties; provide similar clamp resilience and resistance to kinking and necking; have a similar "feel"; and are substantially more flexible and significantly less dense than PVC. At the same time they undergo minimal colour shift upon heat aging after exposure to gamma irradiation, the most severe type of sterilisation. A typical compound in the series, Medalist MD-575, actually exhibits 70% less heat-aged colour shift than a gamma-stabilised PVC compound of comparable hardness.

Teknor Apex Company operates manufacturing and development centres around the world including Singapore and Suzhou, China with commercial and technical offices throughout the Asia Pacific region.