White, John

Substitution is normal in medical equipment maintenance, and the argument about it is usually framed as a choice between original and alternative parts. The framing is misleading, because the question that determines the outcome is not where the part came from but whether the device’s documented performance and safety characteristics were preserved. A component obtained […]

A service level agreement is easier to read than it looks, provided the reader separates three things that the document usually presents together: the response commitment, the restoration commitment, and the measure that determines whether either was met. Most agreements are strong on the first, weaker on the second and vaguest on the third, which

A sterilization record has a specific job: it should allow somebody who was not present to establish that a particular load went through a process that was known to be adequate, and that the process behaved as expected on that occasion. Most records achieve one of those and not the other. They show that a

Owning equipment means owning the consequences of what happens to it, and insurance is how those consequences are transferred. The transfer is narrower than most buyers expect: cover responds to defined events at declared values, subject to conditions about how the equipment is maintained, stored and notified. A clinic that assumes insurance makes it whole

Sterilizer selection looks like a capacity decision and is actually a load-type decision. The classes of benchtop sterilizer exist because different loads need different air removal and different process control, and a sterilizer that is adequate for one load type may be inadequate for another. Clinics that choose on chamber size and price frequently discover

Capacity decisions are usually made on average demand and then tested by the busiest month. A department that buys for the average queues when the peak arrives, and one that buys for the peak pays for unused capacity for the rest of the year. Rental exists precisely to fill that gap, and it is best

Two buyers can agree the same price, the same equipment and the same delivery date, and still fall into a dispute, because neither of them said who was responsible for the import clearance, who carried the risk while the crate sat on a quay, or which of them would pay the terminal charge that appeared

Dialysis unit planning fails in a specific and predictable way: the treatment equipment is planned in detail while the water treatment and distribution system, which the whole unit depends on, is treated as an engineering afterthought. Water treatment determines the layout, the utility requirements, the service arrangements and the unit’s expansion capacity, and retrofitting it

A department’s test instruments are the foundation of every result it produces, and they are frequently the least documented equipment it owns. A physiological simulator with no calibration history, an electrical safety analyser whose last certificate is in an email folder, a pressure meter that has been adjusted by somebody who does not remember doing

A CT scanner purchase is decided by three things that are largely invisible at the point of sale: how much life remains in the tube, what the service history says about the rest of the system, and whether the room can accept it. Each of those is knowable before purchase and each is expensive to