EBME Forums Forums Management Medical Equipment Management Purchase Advisory Group

Anyone got one these quangos in operation yet as per Controls Assurance Medical Devices Management Criterion 3?

Or anyone got a copy of a pro-forma application for requests to purchase new equipment they could let me have please?

Rob
We have a supplies/ebme users group. We look at procurement as part of that group and based our strategy around DB9801 recomendations, chapter 3.
We have an equipment appraisal form (which is on the downloads section of the website)
We do not have a procurement form, but the supplies dept are to produce a local catalogue with standardised types of equipment and consumables used within our trust.

John,
I have emailed you a copy of Dewsbury form. To : John@ebme.co.uk

alex

Rob,

I have emailed it to you. I sent it to John in error.

Alex

We have a group that prioritises Capital Medical Equipment (over £5k). It comprises of the:
Finance Director (chairman)
A non Executive Director
Chair of the senior medical staff
medical director
director of operations
supplies
and last but by no means least! the medical electronics manager.
We are in the third year with this now and appears to be working well.

We ahve a similar group to Bob with the difference that it is chaired by:

Mr.French - Chief Executive

he has a special interest in Medical equipment and Medical Physics issues. He is very supportive of Medical Equipment management and training. Unless you get him / her on board it will be difficult to achieve much. All replacement / new capital and revenue issues are taken by myself to the group for signing off. All discussions and disputes do take place outside that meeting. We meet 5 to 6 times a year but in case of difficulties I have direct access to him or the hospital manager.

The message is: Get your chief executive involved and you will win.

Alex

Copies of Capital Bid forms that I have used previously have been sent to the Website administrator. These will be available as downloads for anyone that is interested. It would be helpful to know how equipment replacement is being funded by most hospitals - what is the average spend on Medical Equipment ? Perhaps this would be an idea for a new survey ?

CAROLINE,
At Dewsbury we have an allocation of around £1.2M from capital every year for replacement only, capital and revenue. In addition to this, we get extra monies for say cardiology , etc + public donations which go towards all new and replacement programme.

The whole lot goes into one pot and gets used for Medical equipment.

I hope this starts the survey off!
alex

Thanks all for the input so far. Thanks Alex for your pro-forma!

Here at Macclesfield, we have a group called the Capital Planning Forum which meets regularly to vet & approve Directorate bids for any service improvements including medical equipment. The group comprises the Director of Facilities, the Director of Finance (obviously!) & several other managers including myself. The group is only interested in the “big picture” aspects of planning capital spending.

The Trust is now in the process of setting-up a Specialist Procurement Group, consisting representation from Supplies, Estates, Medical Engineering, Infection Control, Clinical Risk Management etc. It is hoped this group will ensure that any bid submitted for new capital equipment (including medical) has been fully thought through & includes things like installation, revenue (including staffing), maintenance, user training, decontamination, consumables, COSHH, etc. This group will explore the fine detail of the bid before sending it to the Capital Forum. That's the plan anyway! It would be nice to think that as a result of this I could get some increase to my budget if my department took on the maintenance responsibility for additional items of medical equipment..…..

All equipment items bought out of Directorate's revenue budgets are referred to me by Supplies before purchase.

Sounds like we have a little bit of everything!

We have a Medical Equipment Committee (comprising the major clinical directors, finance, EBME, purchasing) with responsibility for approving ALL medical equipment purchases (replacement or additional), and including capital development programmes. Users are constrained from purchasing directly, even if they have identified a funding source.

A sub committee of MEC (comprising EBME (chair), Risk mgt/Health/Safety, Infection control) review all applications prior to going to MEC to examine any related issues in respect of compliance, standardisation, decontamination etc.

MEC have direct control of equipment capital and revenue budgets (although in reality this is not enough to allow us to even stand still - nothing new there I suppose).

Its major problems are related to prioritisation of scarce resources - measuring one bids validity with respect to the next, and arguments can be 'skewed' by clinical directors arguing more passionately for their own areas. Far from perfect , but does maintain a fair degree of control/standardisation, and requires good justification.
..........this could be an interesting thread