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Joined: Jul 2002
Posts: 499
Sage
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Sage
Joined: Jul 2002
Posts: 499 |
 , heard it all before. Oh look, still here though. Instant attendance to a call and only a simple phone call away, coverage of over 3000 pieces of medical equipment. Professional Advice on tap, oh and an idiot to bring your Sony Walkman to when your favorite "Steps" CD gets jammed  . You obviously have little or no respect for our profession my friend. Could you please take this opportunity to enlighten us as to your disrespectful outbursts. Louis is all ears Louis III P.S. @ those rates. But that’s my earnings potential "v" your actual costs. - again attack could be seen as the best form of defense If you where to earn that potential from the NHS, would that not be your actual cost to the NHS. Is Louis now missing the point here  Oohh give me a holiday please. Potential overtime payment included of course 
No trees were harmed in the posting of this message. However, a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced. كيف الآن يحمّر البقرة
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
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Chris,
The fact is you would like someone to come up with a formula for whole of life costing of your ventilators and then give it to you for nothing. No wonder the costs of employing Medical Engineers seem extravagant to you.
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
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Chris,
Assuming that NHS employees work as hard as private sector ones do, consider a single NHS site: if a range of private companies charge on average £185 (less spare parts), 2 times per annum, for ad-hoc repairs/service/maintenance on 250 pieces of high-risk or high-cost equipment used in your NHS Trust then the £92,460 charge is comparable to the costs of employing a qualified EBME technician full-time.
On average, per day, two repairs might take three hours (or 100, 7.5hr days per annum) and the private Engineers are off to make money from the NHS elsewhere but the NHS Trust has paid the equivalent of an NHS Engineer for one year, including overheads. The private engineer costs the equivalent of more than 2 Full-time NHS technicians to the specific NHS Trust, in this example. This demonstrates that, based on these realistic figures, for simple repairs that take less than a few hours, NHS Engineers are likely to be more cost-effective in the long term.
Typically I think there are about 5000 pieces of medical equipment in a fairly large (700 bed) general hospital, so the problem is magnified. With no technical-support on-site at all; the rate of call-outs would be high and you'd end up with Engineers on-site most of the time.
For the 250 items considered: With the realistic figures, above, the private Engineers must spend less than half the time on site than an NHS engineer to compete with the figure of £60 per hour that you have commented on yourself, including rolling the costs of travelling into this. Hence the incentive to spend as little time on-site as possible, billing of multiple jobs on a single visit and inflating the cost of essential spares so that the cost of overheads and travel is hidden. With additional call outs and charging per-item, on a regular basis, this is a licence to print money.
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Joined: May 2003
Posts: 11
Novice
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Novice
Joined: May 2003
Posts: 11 |
Richard,
As we all work for the same NHS and forum's like these are usually a good place to share information. (As can be seen in other posts.) Then yes, if the information had been gathered in a professional and accurate manner I would have liked it....
Re-inventing the wheel and all that.
Chris - off to look at lifetime costs of his vents...
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Joined: May 2003
Posts: 11
Novice
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Novice
Joined: May 2003
Posts: 11 |
Richard, I agree with your last post !! All I will say is that £200 or what ever is pretty expensive but justifiable (ish) compared to the absolute flaming it received...
People just do not appreciate that they are the most expensive commodity that the NHS has to manage. By using third parties for whatever applications - be that a specialist neuro surgeon for 1 list a month or a service engineer to repair a laser then so be it ...
The expense is a shock but there are real costs behind them.
Now, does anyone have any vent costs ?
Chris.
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
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You said it Chris - they're YOUR vents.
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Joined: May 2003
Posts: 11
Novice
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Novice
Joined: May 2003
Posts: 11 |
Vents to be purchased by the NHS not me, used by Medical and Nursing Staff and maintained / serviced etc by A) the company B) EBME .....
but fair enough call them mine if you want..
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
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To quote a previous posting of yours: Richard,
As we all work for the same NHS and forum's like these are usually a good place to share information. (As can be seen in other posts.) Then yes, if the information had been gathered in a professional and accurate manner I would have liked it....
Re-inventing the wheel and all that.
Chris - off to look at lifetime costs of his vents...
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
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Actually, I can't help you with Ventilator costings because I know nothing about them.
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Joined: Dec 2002
Posts: 171
Mentor
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Mentor
Joined: Dec 2002
Posts: 171 |
Dear Chri M.
The standard hospital costing advice is that the lifetime maintenance cost of an item of medical equipment such as a ventilator will generally be about the same as the initial purchase price (inc VAT).
The expected lifespan of these items is generally reckoned to be 10 years. Manufacturers used to charge approximately 10% of purchase price per annum for comprehensive maintenance contracts. Naturally 10 times 10% = 100% (See ! I went to evening classes.) In recent years contract costs have reduced a fair bit, possibly as a result of improved equipment reliability. I haven't seen many contract details recently but 7.5% of cost is I believe a more usual rate these days.
The above is what departments are advised to budget for BEFORE procuring items.(They rarely do)
Therefore take the purchase price, double it & divide by 10 and you arrive at a reasonable estimate of the basic cost of ownership of the device.
To this you must add User costs such as disposables, storage, training etc.
If you want to know exactly what an NHS EBME technician costs a hospital, then the truth is they cost just what the hospital wants them to cost.
When the management hatches a plan to buy in services to arrive at service cost savings we cost out to be horribly expensive. When they are tired of paying through the nose for contractors we somehow cost out as really cheap.
Isn't the NHS a strange place ?
Hope this is of use to you.
All the best.
Marc
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