Marc,
You may be right, who knows what people use as "medical" equipment in their hospitals and I agree 13000 items are a lot of medical equipment. Our hospital has only some 2000 items. However, I'm inclined to agree with the conclusion that electrical safety is no more important than that the equipment functions properly when "attached" to the patient.
Clearly, testing for electrical safety of medical equipment is very important, especially where there is an electrical connection to the patient.
However, it seems to me that we must be sensible about this. In our unit we try to test all medical equipment at least once per year for electrical safety and we always test it if the equipment has be "opened up" for repair or service irrespective of its due test date.
We use an automated electrical safety analyser (Bio-Tek 601) to save time, as I'm sure that many EBME's and MEMU's use. However, it's important that the technicians who are performing earth bonding, insulation tests, enclosure leakage, patient leakage etc understand why these tests are carried out and the danger to the patient if any test fails.I always explain to trainees why and how these test are performed. But I don't think that we should go overboard and spend hours testing an individual item of equipment, unless engineer's have got time on their hands with nothing better to do,
that's fine.
In my view, it's important that everyone in the department follows the same protocol so that all testing is consistant whether it's electrical safety or functional testing.
