Knowledge

An infusion pump that drifts four percent low does not announce itself. It delivers, the nurse charts the dose, and the error surfaces days later as a clinical picture that does not match the prescription. Preventive maintenance exists for that failure mode rather than for the dramatic one, because the devices that stop working are […]

There are seven steps in a medical device procurement process, and only one of them is about price. The other six exist because a device has to be justified clinically, funded, verified as marketable, sourced, contracted, received and then kept working — and a process that skips any of them moves the cost to a

The counter-intuitive part of a hospital device procurement checklist is that the last item matters more than the first. Needs assessment gets the attention because it is where clinicians argue about specifications, but the checklist only succeeds or fails at commissioning, when somebody has to decide whether the thing that arrived may lawfully be used.

A sterilizer that passes its daily check and still returns a positive spore test has not failed suddenly; it has been failing quietly since the last time somebody verified the process rather than the cycle. That distinction is the whole of clinical instrument sterilization guidance: the sterilizer is not considered safe because it ran, but

A single-doctor clinic and a five-room diagnostic centre will read the same list of advanced diagnostic tools and buy different things, because they are answering different questions. One needs a result in ten minutes at the bedside; the other needs reproducibility across operators and a record that stands up years later. No single device does

Two hospitals can buy the same class of device in the same year and report cost bases that differ by more than the price of the machine. The purchase price is the smallest of five numbers that make up what a device actually costs: acquisition, utilisation, maintenance, obsolescence and compliance. The one that decides the

A laparoscopic tower that goes down mid-list is not a maintenance inconvenience; it is a conversion to open surgery waiting to be decided. Minimally invasive treatment systems earn their place because they avoid that decision, and because the patient on the table recovers in days rather than weeks. But the same systems carry a limitation