White, John

Sanctions and end-use controls are the part of a medical equipment transaction that nobody checks until a bank refuses to process the payment or a forwarder refuses the booking. By then the equipment may already have been committed, and unwinding a sale for compliance reasons is more expensive than not making it. The exposure is […]

Hospital surplus is not ordinary resale with a different seller. The equipment comes out of an environment where it was maintained, documented and used clinically, and the organisation disposing of it carries obligations that an ordinary seller does not. Those obligations are largely documentary, and they are the reason a hospital disposal can be cleaner

Capital equipment rarely fails on the bench. It fails between the loading dock and the receiving bay, and the damage pattern is predictable: a gantry shifted by a single hard stop, a detector panel cracked by a pallet that flexed, a connector sheared because the gantry was restrained by its own cables. For a buyer,

A new dental surgery is usually planned in the wrong order. The chair and the cabinetry are chosen first because they are the most visible items, and the constraints that will govern everything else, which are the room, the services and the workflow, are resolved afterwards. The consequence is a surgery that works but costs

Testing intervals are usually fixed by habit rather than by analysis: a department that has always tested annually tests annually, and the interval survives every change of equipment, use and risk. The cost of an interval that is too short is real but modest, while the cost of one that is too long is a

Portable X-ray equipment is traded regularly and assessed badly, because the requirements that matter are not visible in the device itself. Verification of performance is one question, and the safety and regulatory framework surrounding the equipment’s use and transfer is another, and a buyer who answers only the first has established that the device works

The export side of a medical equipment transaction is usually left to the forwarder, which works until a consignment is stopped because the goods, the destination or the end user falls within a control that nobody checked. The stop is expensive in a way that customs delays are not, because export controls can turn on

An asking price is a hypothesis about what a device is worth to a buyer who has a choice, and most sellers test it by waiting. Waiting is expensive: a device that sits unsold loses value through market movement, occupies space and, in some cases, ages in ways that affect its support position. Setting a

A lifecycle notice is short, formal and easy to file without acting on, and that is precisely why it causes problems. The notice usually states a date, and the date means different things for different activities: an end to spare parts supply, an end to software updates, an end to service support, or a withdrawal

A maintenance programme is judged by what it prevents and by what it can demonstrate, and most programmes are stronger on the first than the second. A department may keep equipment running for years while being unable to show why a particular device was maintained on a particular schedule, or what the results of that