BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING
Obviously, this is never going to happen, and hospitals need clinical equipment to operate. Although we repair and maintain medical equipment, our job is much more than walking around with analysers on a cart, making sure that equipment ‘works’. We are the hidden force within the hospital, working behind the scenes of surgical and emergency departments. Not only do we provide a safety analysis on equipment, but we also we calibrate and inspect it to see if a component is wearing out. Then we replace it, preventing the need for emergency repairs that always seem to occur outside normal working hours.
I read recently that the space shuttle, Challenger, that exploded in 1986, resulting in the loss of seven lives and a billion dollar space shuttle, was caused by a faulty $2.00 O-ring. It reminded me of a piece of advice that an old colleague and NZIHE board member, Nigel Cross, gave to me. He told me that whenever I worked on a piece of equipment, I should remember that the next person to be attached to that equipment could be me, my wife, or one of my children.
How one reacts to disaster A recent article on the AAMI (The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation) website was titled ‘When Disaster Strikes, How HTM rises to the occasion’, and I thought to myself, when disaster strikes, it should be ‘business as usual’, as the biomeds should have already been prepared. After the main Christchurch earthquake, I can recall sitting at my bench testing intravenous fluid pumps, which is the bread and butter of what we do, and thinking that there must be something better that I could be
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doing to help out at the hospital during the time of crisis. In hindsight, this is probably how things should work in Clinical Engineering; it’s an indication that our equipment held up well during a period of extraordinarily high use. As the clinical engineer in my hospital responsible for the maintenance of the equipment located in our emergency department, it is a source of honour to me that my work supports and enables the clinicians who are doing the real life- saving work. This is particularly fitting, given the mass casualty incidents that we have experienced over the last 10 years, such as the previously mentioned earthquakes, or, more recently, the mosque shooting that occurred earlier this year in Christchurch, resulting in 49 gunshot victims arriving at our hospital’s Emergency Department within the space of an hour.
In today’s throwaway society, biomeds work to keep equipment working like new in hospitals, clinics, and laboratories,
saving our organisations millions of dollars every year. They have an extremely important role to play as regards not only the repair and testing of medical equipment, but other important aspects also.
Here are some examples of other activities that ‘biomeds’ are involved in:
Managing equipment from install to disposal Pre-purchase planning
I suspect that every ‘biomed’ has had a crate turn up in their workshop that they were not expecting, and that they have known nothing about it. Upon excitedly unpacking it, they have found a piece of equipment that they have never seen before, minus manuals and statutory paperwork, and, in the odd case, with power cables fitted with the wrong country plug. As a consequence, the individual has had to go back to the supplier, requesting such standard information as WAND, which is New Zealand’s medical equipment database operated by the New Zealand government, and ARTG inclusion documentation, service manuals, and the like. To this, the response from the supplier is sometimes ‘no one has ever asked for that before’, despite the requirements being a statutory ones. According to 3551, the equipment must also have the correct markings, such as the manufacturer’s name, supply voltage and ratings, and other markings. Biomeds are responsible for ensuring that equipment complies with these basic standards.
Pre-purchase planning is not just about ensuring that the equipment to be purchased is of high quality and fulfils
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August 2020 Health Estate Journal 25
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