At the Nova Scotia Health Innovation Hub, we focus on scaling health innovations across the healthcare system. What we didn’t anticipate was seeing one of those homegrown solutions make its way to onto a global television stage.
That’s exactly what happens tonight when Ring Rescue is featured on Season 2, Episode 10 of the popular television drama, The Pitt.
The Ring Rescue story starts with Patrick Hennessey and Brad MacKeil, mechanical engineering graduates from Dalhousie University, who were completing their capstone project. They teamed up with Dr. Kevin Spencer, a mechanical engineer and emergency doctor at Dartmouth General Hospital, who had treated many patients with rings stuck on their fingers.
By combining engineering skills with Dr. Spencer’s hands-on experience in a busy emergency department, they worked together to solve a common medical problem that older tools hadn’t fixed well.
“Over half of adults wear rings," says Dr. Spencer. "Fingers can swell for many reasons, and ring entrapment is a common clinical issue in emergency medicine. In fact, surveys suggest roughly 70 per cent of ring wearers have already experienced a stuck ring at some point. Simple cases are simple, maybe resolved at home with a bit of soap or other lubrication to the finger. But more complex cases can escalate into time sensitive and finger-threatening tourniquet emergencies that are very difficult to solve without the right equipment."
“The complexity varies with ring material and the degree of swelling, and it is important to realize that traditional ring cutter devices were designed for soft metals like gold and silver, and these routinely fail against modern durable rings," continues Spencer. "This gap created an unusual workaround, and well-intentioned frontline clinicians began improvising at the bedside with repurposed tools instead of medical devices purpose built and validated for safety."
In 2018, Ring Rescue was born, and the idea was refined into a practical clinical system — a made-in-Nova Scotia innovation designed to improve patient safety and give clinicians a reliable, effective and medically appropriate way to manage ring entrapment.
The Ring Rescue Kit includes two purpose-built medical devices: the Compression Device, which uses an air-pressure-filled cuff to gently compress a finger, temporarily reducing swelling and allowing many rings to be removed without cutting, and the Dolphin Ring Cutter, a sophisticated electrically powered medical device designed to safely cut through any ring metal, including tungsten and titanium, while shielding the finger.
Either approach can be completed in approximately five minutes and does not necessarily require a physician, saving time, reducing patient stress, preventing further injury, and in many situations protecting the finger from more serious complications.
One case, from February 2024, illustrates just how effective Ring Rescue can be. An 11-year-old girl tried on a friend’s ring and was unable to remove it. Her finger began to swell, and repeated attempts to take it off only made the swelling worse. Her family brought her to a local emergency department, but when physicians and nurses were unable to free the ring, she was transferred to a second hospital. After more than six hours spanning two hospitals without success, surgical intervention was being considered.
An EMS supervisor who learned of the situation offered to retrieve the Ring Rescue kit their team had recently obtained but had not yet used. Within minutes, the ring was safely removed, sparing the child and her family further distress, avoiding surgery altogether, and highlighting how preparedness and modernization matters.
After building early momentum outside of Nova Scotia, Ring Rescue then partnered with Nova Scotia Health and the Health Innovation Hub to deploy kits across emergency departments throughout the province. Recognizing the benefit for both patients and the healthcare system, Nova Scotia Health supported rapid implementation, and within months Ring Rescue kits were available in every emergency department in Nova Scotia.
“Our products are now in every emergency department across Nova Scotia — a standard-of-care deployment that benefits patient care and health system efficiency and of course supports Ring Rescue as we work toward similar standardization across other healthcare systems,” says Dr. Spencer. “Having a system like Nova Scotia Health willing to partner with innovative local MedTech companies, break down procurement barriers, and provide system level data is a great local win, and it’s not like that everywhere. When it comes to supporting life sciences innovation, Nova Scotia is increasingly emerging as a leader."
For the Health Innovation Hub, Ring Rescue represents exactly the kind of innovation they strive to accelerate.
“Our goal is to remove barriers so great ideas can reach patients faster,” says Doris Grant, Managing Director, Nova Scotia Health Innovation Hub. “Ring Rescue is a textbook example of how a locally developed solution can scale provincially, expand internationally, and improve care for patients in real-world settings — and of course also patients on television, with The Pitt being a great exposure opportunity.”
Today, Ring Rescue kits can be found in more than two thousand hospitals, fire-rescue agencies, and EMS organizations across North America, including institutions such as Mayo Clinic, Cedars-Sinai, and the Cleveland Clinic, with more than 50,000 single-use Dolphin Ring Cutter discs already used in clinical care. Those 50,000 discs represent fingers saved in real clinical scenarios.
In 2025, Dr. Spencer — a fan of The Pitt and its dedication to portraying emergency medicine realistically — reached out to the creative team behind the show to introduce the Ring Rescue System. He later provided a demonstration to lead actor and co-executive producer Noah Wyle at an emergency medicine conference in Salt Lake City. Impressed with the technology, the show confirmed that Ring Rescue would be featured in an episode.
“It’s a really well written series, and I think the show takes exceptional pride in portraying emergency medicine accurately,” says Dr. Spencer. “To have our product appear there is very exciting for us, and it’s also a testament to the show for highlighting emerging and important medical technologies that clinicians are actually using.”
Dr. Spencer and his team are on a mission to establish a new global standard of care for this common medical challenge. Their innovation is not only transforming how emergency departments manage ring entrapment — it’s also finding use in unexpected frontlines, from fire stations and correctional facilities to even jewelry stores.
For the Nova Scotia Health Innovation Hub, it’s a strong example of the impact that can come from supporting local innovation.
