It’s a professional service Geoff , so no its not for free , I don’t want to abuse my membership to the ebme site and so for the record I have not asked anyone or have any expectation that anyone should post a link to my site ( Just so others are clear on that Geoff )
I cannot say who writes the troubleshooting guides , there are 1000s of them but neither do most biomeds know who wrote the service manuals – but that’s what we have to work with – some are excellent , most are good / to ok , some are useless . They are getting better !
I am of the view that medical equipment is safe , in general manufacturing techniques and the current pm programs reduce most technical risk associated with them to single digit %’s – and so , if safe use / outcome associated with equipment is the objective ( fixing . pm’s , training ) then we need to look at the largest risk and deal with that first .
The current process is that equipment arrives in the workshop with a label “broken” and it reappears in the department with a note “fixed” or some or other version of that – what I propose is using the existing system, safety & quality , educators etc to get the best outcome . Reporting NPF is objective no matter what happens, either it works or it doesn’t. If over a 6 month period a device or department have a trend which is increasing – the system needs to intervene. Its reported as a metric , everbody gets to see that , educators do what they do , if it doesn’t work ( NPF is still going up ) , they change what they do , etc etc
As far as biomeds been assertive – I am not referring to individuals – I know quite a few hard nuts , including myself who don’t win popularity contests - “biomeds’ the profession !
See the following which was released by Engineers Australia in 2011 :
http://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/sit.../Crossroads.pdfLook at page 17 , 1st paragraph – the organisation which accredits hospitals in Australia is deemed to be “ questionable “ in their ability to make a technical assessment of a biomed department according to this report ( something I agree with from personal experience and I posted that observation on their site ) - it’s our lack of involvement with the ACHS which is the problem , now there is some history here so I don’t want to say nothing has been done about it ( because I don’t know , yet ) but the end result is that , in my experience , unqualified assessors have ticked the box to say its all ok .
