EBME Forums Forums Management Medical Equipment Management Is anybody using the Smiths Omnifuse PCA

Hi I would be interested if anyone is using the Smiths Omnifuse. How do you rate them, have you had any problems with them or the handset?

Bought 4 Omnifuse PCA's and 4 Omnifuse syringe drivers in July 2004. 2 have been returned for repair under warranty and one hand set faulty. These units have been faulty since beginning of March (no fast repair turn around). Getting spares, user training or items like Technician Support software is extremely difficult and time consuming.
How do I rate them - *!*!*!*!.
Would I buy any more - you must be j****g
enough said

Hi, We have 50 Omnifuse drivers (none are PCA) and have found that many problems are caused by users not loading/unloading syringes correctly which can only be solved by training.
They are not very intuitive to use, but are a good driver when used properly. We have had good support from Graseby with user training although I have heard that others have been less fortunate.
Reliability hasn't been too bad if you ignore the user problems.
Would we buy more? - not sure about this, if starting from scratch, probably not, but as we have now got through the difficult period we might consider it.

Same as Peter really, we had a lot in the middle east, its a good pump with lots of advantages once the staff are trained up but it was released a bit early and was a bit bugged up, hence it lost a lot of ground to Alaris and never recovered, its ok now though Im reliably informed and you shouldnt have any problems with a good approach

we hav about 6 of these pumps, mainly located in paeds and maternity wards. I guess they opted for these types of pumps in these areas due to the low infusion rates. I do not believe they use them however for PCA, but may be wrong as I do recall seeing a handset or two lurking somewhere.
I'd be inclined to agree with Peter and Alf, once the training issues have been overcome these pumps are not be too difficult to gain the staff familarity. However the Omnifuse did suffer from nusiance alarms in its early release stages, but memory recalls SIMS Graseby (now Smiths) did a software upgrade on all our units to bring them upto speed and inline.

From the technical point of view, we love em, because the technician software is a a great diagnostic tool. However it has the oppuortunity to alter clinical settings (which we believe is not such a good thing)i.e make sure your technicians realise the FULL implications of a mouse click before doing it.

The event history is great for finding what time, date and error codes were generated.

Would we buy more Omnifuse pumps? If it were upto me, yes.
What would we like to change? The blinking syringe load/unload button- it confusese the heck out the nursing staff who prefer the older method of the slide and lever syringe mechanism loading on the earlier 31xx range.

Good luck, what ever you decide.

Thanks for posts recieved back in May, the reason for this latest post is some of our Anaesthetists are telling us they have heard alot of negative comments about them from other hospitals. Any comments on this would be great. Thanks

Geraint, We've had the units in use for 18 months now. There were problems initially with the handsets which were resolved under warranty. We did have a number of problems with the early batches of non PCA Omnifuses but mainly due to user errors. The PCA Omnifuses have given us very little trouble. I and the anaesthetists are quite happy to continue with any future purchases. The main advantage is training on both types of Omnifuse helps reduce the user errors as operating system is now far more familiar to users.