Horses for courses, Geoff. Although I haven't seen or worked on a Robert's pump for years and I wasn't aware that they told the time or that their use on a patient was recorded as part of their function for medico-legal reasons.
The sort of equipment I'm referring to is £5000 defibrillator monitors, £15,000 CTG machines, £20,000 endoscopes and associated equipment on video endoscopy stacks; ventilators and anaesthetics workstations.
High-risk devices that cost a lot to replace, have to have a lot of service-input, need to be located for servicing often and whose uptime needs to be maintained and that needs to record an accurate time and date for medico-legal purposes.
Wouldn't the ability to have a device that can transmit an error automatically and for this to be located on a PC network be useful to servicing departments? Can we always rely on operators to tell us where it is or what the indicated fault is?
Back to here and now, rather than "yesteryear", from personal experience, what I am hearing of are significant numbers of £600 suction units "walking" off resuscitation trolleys, never to be seen again. How much are passive RF-tags and sensors?
Perhaps if passive RF-tagged cases were used for these devices and on those used for storing flexible endoscopes and there were monitoring at the exits of the hospital then maybe the rate of thefts, if not servicing issues, could be reduced.
