EBME PREVIEW


Answering questions of patient safety


Taking place on 30 April 2015 in Milton Keynes, the EBME seminar is an independent, educational event for healthcare professionals that are responsible for healthcare technology management, procurement, user training, maintenance, and governance. Dr JOHN SANDHAM FIHEEM MIET, chairman, provides an insight into some of the topical issues that will be high on the agenda.


NHS hospitals, like many other hospitals worldwide, face fundamental questions of patient safety, budgetary limits, and the ever-increasing availability of medical technology. Healthcare technology procurement, use, maintenance, and management policy is a serious issue recognised by research undertaken worldwide. Some of the critical literature discussing ‘healthcare technology issues’ come from the National Audit Office, the National Patient Safety Agency, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency and the World Health Organization.


Healthcare technology management


is an extremely complex area within NHS hospitals covering the procurement, training, maintenance and governance of medical devices ranging from magnetic resonance imagers (MRI) to simple thermometers. Many different professionals from within the hospital must interact to ensure they select and use devices to deliver quality health services – whether they are from the procurement department buying devices, clinical departments using devices, maintenance departments repairing and maintaining the devices, or the governance


department ensuring compliance with internal policies and external regulations. Medical devices are used in hospitals for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. It is important that these devices are used correctly to ensure the safety of the patient. Indeed, there is evidence that patients are sometimes harmed or die because devices are not used correctly. Discussion on the reasons for these


Primary policy area


Good acquisition (Standardisation)


Secondary policy area


User Training


Repair and maintenance


Policy outcomes


Improved use


Fewer incidents


Improved availability


incidents, with the clinicians and nurses involved, has led me to the conclusion that there is too wide a variety of devices within healthcare organisations that perform the same task. This variety makes it difficult to ensure user training is carried out on all devices. Therefore, many hospitals take the decision to only train on the highest risk devices that can harm or kill (in the event of misuse), and allow self-certification on all other devices. This risk-based approach is the only one that is considered feasible in the short term. Consequently, the only way to improve training, and thereby reduce the risk of harm to patients, is to standardise devices to a single equipment type from a single supplier for each type of clinical technology application. This is difficult to achieve, at present, as purchasing mechanisms, although moving towards standardisation, have a long way to go. This is mainly because NHS hospitals have hundreds of different technology groups in use for different diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. It therefore makes it extremely difficult to find agreement from users within each technology group, when there can be hundreds of device users across multiple wards and departments


APRIL 2015 THE CLINICAL SERVICES JOURNAL 35


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