Hmmm. I'm not dwelling on that particularly - if the risk was that high your hospital would find the money (like they all do when it comes down to it - as if by magic) to pay top-whack and get the "real experts" in (no offence intended). At the moment it's just probably convenient to have EBME doing it since it saves someone in the upper echelons having to worry too hard about coordinating contracts, etc (and the job is being done to everyones satisfaction, currently, of course).
As soon as the staff in EBME, that are skilled at doing it, leave or the SH1T hits the fan then they'll soon have the responsibility off the department. If they can do a similar thing with medical kit, i.e. privatise and put medical engineering services (hard services) out to tender, etc, they can get someone else in to do telecoms (soft services).
Lets just say that EBMEs are in existence, for the time being, because there's nothing much cheaper or better on the horizon and management need to have people (at least on paper) on site who are seen to be maintaining certain types of kit to give them a bit of "insurance" or an "easy" option.
