Brushing Teeth Without a Sink A Sealed Single-Use Oral Care Kit for the Hospital Bedside

This application covers an oral care system built as a single sealed container: a measured dose of antiseptic fluid held behind a frangible barrier, a toothbrush stored inside the container itself, and a sliding funnel and tube that breaks the seal on the way in and then doubles as a spittoon on the way out. The applicant is Sage Products, the Illinois maker of hospital patient hygiene products, now part of Stryker.

The Problem

The background section of the specification starts from a straightforward observation: standard toothbrush designs are not ideal for hospitals or other medical treatment facilities where patients may have compromised immune systems. In those settings, it says, there is an increased risk of contracting pneumonia, which is why compliance with a proper oral care regimen of three to four brushings a day matters more than it does at home.

A standard toothbrush is also the wrong instrument for the patient. The document lists the reasons plainly. A reused brush carries a risk of bacterial infection. Many patients cannot spit or otherwise voluntarily clear liquid from their mouths. Many have no easy access to water. Some cannot hold or manipulate a brush of ordinary size and shape. And standard toothpaste is unsuitable for a patient who cannot rinse, quite apart from the difficulty of finding the tube and applying the right amount.

Then there is the logistics problem, which is the one that actually drives compliance. Oral care in a ward is repetitious by design: evacuation, brushing, swabbing the mouth and gums, repeated every few hours around the clock. Each repetition requires a nurse or a patient to assemble a set of items. The specification describes that gathering as cumbersome, and the implication is the obvious one, that a regimen requiring assembly every few hours is a regimen that gets skipped.

What This Invention Does

The system packages the whole procedure as one disposable unit. A container defines an interior portion. Inside it sits a repository, in some embodiments a moulded receptacle and in others a snap-in solution cup, holding a unit dose of oral fluid, described as an antiseptic fluid and sized in one example at 9.5 mL. A barrier of foil, plastic or other frangible material keeps that fluid sealed off from the rest of the container until use. The toothbrush is stored dry in an internal chamber above the barrier, so brush and dose travel and sit at the bedside as a single sealed object.

The component that ties it together is what the specification calls a spittoon straw: a funnel whose base connects to a tube, sliding down inside the container. The end of the tube is cut on a diagonal, so the plane of its opening lies at an angle to the tube’s axis, and the resulting leading edge forms a cutting portion. Pushing the assembly down drives that cutting edge through the seal on the solution cup. Claim 1, which is written as a method, is exactly this sequence: move the funnel in a first direction towards the interior of the container, and breach the barrier with the tube.

Once the seal is open, the brush head is pushed into the fluid to saturate the bristles. Withdrawing it draws the head back through a neck of reduced diameter, which squeezes off excess fluid so the patient does not get a mouthful of loose liquid. Some embodiments use a flexible septum instead of a neck, with the same wiping effect. The brush itself is designed for the setting: a foam section beside the bristles, disc shaped projections along the handle that both give a grip and seal the conduit against dust, and in several embodiments a hollow stem with a suction port that connects to ward suction so fluid can be drawn straight out of the mouth.

After brushing, the funnel does the second half of the job. It gives the patient a wide target to spit into, and channels the brushing waste down the tube into the same receptacle the fluid came out of. The container is dimensioned to be spill resistant, so that tipping it on its side moves little or no fluid out through the chamber. When the session is finished the brush goes back into the chamber and the whole assembly is discarded.

Key Features

• Sealed unit dose of oral fluid. A repository inside the container holds a measured volume of antiseptic fluid behind a frangible barrier until the moment of use.
• A tube that opens its own seal. The distal end of the tube is cut at an angle to its axis, forming a cutting edge that breaches the barrier when the assembly is pushed down.
• Brush stored inside the container. The internal chamber houses the toothbrush between uses, so a single sealed object holds every item the procedure needs.
• Excess fluid wiped off on withdrawal. A neck of reduced diameter, or a flexible septum, squeezes surplus fluid from the brush head as it is drawn out.
• Funnel as bedside spittoon. The same funnel that carried the tube down gives the patient a large target for brushing waste and channels it into the receptacle, in a container designed to resist spilling.
• Suction ready brush design. Several embodiments give the toothbrush a hollow stem and a suction port, so fluid can be drawn from the mouth of a patient who cannot spit.

Who Is Behind It

Sage Products, LLC is based in Cary, Illinois, and makes disposable patient hygiene products for hospitals, long term care and home care, including bathing cloths, oral care kits and turn and position systems. The company was acquired by Stryker Corporation in 2016 in a transaction reported at 2.8 billion US dollars, and its oral care range is now sold under the Sage brand within Stryker. The commercial line the specification maps onto is recognisable: suction toothbrushes, oral rinse and single use oral care kits marketed around reducing pneumonia risk in ventilated and dependent patients.

Six inventors are named: Paul Michael Fowler, Ronald Christopher Cagle, Theresa L. Sebastian, Daniel R. Ulreich, Jodi Marie Balbinot and Kristin Marie Sexton. That is a product development team rather than a single designer, and the shape of the specification reflects it, with a long run of alternative container geometries, seal types, brush handle profiles and funnel arrangements set out across more than twenty figure groups.

The priority chain is deep. This application is a divisional of Australian application 2025202200, itself a divisional of 2023203027, itself a divisional of 2017357084, which was the Australian national phase entry of PCT/US2017/061633 filed on 14 November 2017. That in turn claims priority from three United States provisional applications: 62/421,911 filed 14 November 2016, 62/457,708 filed 10 February 2017 and 62/519,049 filed 13 June 2017. The three provisionals filed seven months apart suggest a design that was still moving while the priority year ran.

Why It Matters

Oral care in hospitals is one of the few interventions with a clear line to a hospital acquired infection outcome. Poor oral hygiene in intubated and dependent patients is associated with ventilator-associated pneumonia and aspiration pneumonia, and structured oral care protocols are a standard element of prevention bundles in intensive care. The specification does not name ventilator-associated pneumonia specifically, referring to pneumonia risk in general, but the suction equipped brush embodiments and the applicant’s product range both point squarely at that population.

The design logic is the interesting part. None of the individual elements is novel in isolation: a frangible foil seal, an angled tube end that pierces it, a wiping neck, a funnel. What the claims cover is the arrangement, and the arrangement is chosen to remove decisions and steps from a task performed every few hours by a busy nurse. Compliance engineering of this kind, where the clinical benefit comes from the procedure being done at all rather than from any single component performing better, is a recurring pattern in single use medical consumables.

The filing strategy is worth reading. A 2016 priority date pursued through a PCT, an Australian national phase and three successive divisionals to a 2026 filing indicates a family kept deliberately alive for close to a decade, with claim scope reshaped at each step. Claim 1 here is a method of use rather than an apparatus claim, with the system claims following behind it, which is a common way to reach the act of using a device that is already sold. For a consumable sold in volume into hospital supply contracts, that reach matters more than it would for a capital item.

Related Concepts

• Ventilator-associated pneumonia – the hospital acquired infection that structured oral care protocols aim to reduce.
• Oral hygiene – the regimen the system is designed to make repeatable at the bedside.
• Antiseptic – the class of oral fluid held in the sealed repository.
• Unit dose – the single measured quantity packaging model the container follows.
• Injection moulding – the manufacturing method the specification describes for the container body.
• Stryker – the medical technology company that acquired the applicant in 2016.

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AU 2026202100 was published in the Australian Official Journal of Patents on 9 April 2026 and is open for public inspection. Patent applications represent inventions that are sought to be protected and do not necessarily reflect commercially available products.