Looking back at the previous posts on this subject, there is no mention of the innacuracies of the internal clocks on medical devices. In between PPMs some clocks can lose several minutes so the issue of time recording on the machines can be irrelevant. Last week I had a conversation with the charge nurse on our cardiac ICU about the times on their defibs. He was happy to leave them on GMT but the minutes were out by upto 12 mins.
As for the GMT/ BST thing we tried to force all users to keep to GMT by putting prominent labels on equipment stating "this device is set to GMT" but we found that where the users could change the time, they did. Pagewriters are a good example of this. The ECG department had some on GMT and others on BST, the ones on the wards were left alone.
I think that the users rely on built in clocks too much. They tend to have a simplisitc view of technology and take as fact the messages displayed on their euqipment. I would have thought that it would be very difficult to argue in law that the time depicted on any equipment is acceptable as a de facto record of the time of day corresponding to an actual event. Without being sychronised to a standard clock the times on the devices can only be used as a guide. We fitted a rugby clock to our CICU network in response to a request by the consultant anaesthetist. In doing so our IT bod noticed that the time on the hospital's network servers were all different, by upto six minutes.
