BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING
Michael Brown says that one of his favourite things to do on the weekends nowadays is to walk into the city centre, taking in the sights and sounds of the inner city.
shortly after the quakes was from a well- known New Zealand property developer, Bob Jones, who is claimed to have said that ‘the earthquakes did not kill Christchurch, the city was already dead’. While I feel that may have been true at the time, I am pleased to say that the city has turned a corner in the last year or two. New buildings have been rebuilt to replace old structures, and new roads and pathways have been rebuilt throughout the city. New facilities, such as Hoyts EntEX movie theatres and Turanga, the City Library, or the huge Margaret Mahy Playground, have reopened in the Central City, and along with other construction currently underway, the city centre is turning into a dynamic, exciting place to visit. I think many would agree with me that the city is now a better place than before the quakes destroyed parts of it.
Taking in the sights of sounds One of my favourite things to do on the weekends nowadays is to walk into the city centre with my girls, taking in the sights and sounds of the inner city, before checking out a new café, the gallery, museum, or the Margaret Mahy Playground. I am based at Christchurch Public Hospital, as a Biomedical Services Technician. A tertiary hospital with 550 beds, Christchurch Hospital is the largest teaching and research hospital in the South Island of New Zealand, with over 4,000 staff on site. It provides a full range of emergency, acute, elective, and outpatient services. In addition, Christchurch Hospital has the busiest Emergency Department in Australasia, treating more than 83,000 patients a year. On average, 300 patients pass through the Emergency Department every day. It’s an organisation that I enjoy working for, and I love being able to apply my skills to assist in patient care. As a Biomedical Services Technician, I am a member of a team that currently consists of 31 members, making it the
24 Health Estate Journal August 2020
largest clinical engineering department in New Zealand. Out of the 31 members, our department is broken down into smaller sub-groups, comprising a dedicated dialysis service, mobility services, school and community dental, theatres, labs, and several other hospitals. Our department also manages equipment over more than 50 sites, from private hospitals through to small medical centres.
Servicing ‘anything that plugs into a wall’
When people ask me what I do as a ‘Biomed’, I tell them that I service and repair anything that plugs into a patient and a wall. A colleague once described it this way – if all the clinicians moved to a new building, we would go with the doctors and nurses, whereas Facilities Maintenance would stay with the building. The main part of my job is maintaining and repairing medical devices, but the role is much broader than this. All medical centres and hospitals in New Zealand must comply with the AS/ NZS3551 standard for managing medical equipment. In Australia, I understand that this standard is considered best practice, whereas in New Zealand, compliance with the standard is mandated by legislation; New Zealand law dictates
that we must comply with this standard. AS/NZS3551 is my bible, and most of what I do is prescribed in the document. It’s important to recognise, of course, that the Clinical Engineering department is not just about repairing broken things, which is how many staff appear to see us. Clinicians and hospital managers tend to relegate biomeds to lower ground floors, external buildings, and out-of-the-way places. Even in my own hospital facility where I work, we are on the lower ground floor, just down the hallway from the mortuary. We sometimes joke ‘in-house’ about how handy it is given the age of many of my colleagues. And without getting sidetracked, the ageing workforce in Clinical Engineering is something that I feel our organisations, the IHEA and NZIHE, need to address.
An essential service
Medical equipment is essential in running a hospital. I was recently in a conversation with some nurses, and while I repaired their ECG monitoring system, the tired nurses coming to the end of their night shift joked about how wonderful it would be to work in a technology-free hospital – where there was no equipment that could break down, and they would just guess at what a patient’s vital signs were.
The Canterbury District Health Board team.
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