EBME Forums Forums Maintenance Technical Assistance Summer / Winter Time

Hi

For a bit of research I am trying to find out what others Hospitals do when it comes to that time of the year for putting the clocks forward or back? As a department we are having a look at the possibility of moving the equipment on site to GMT hopefully to provide some form of consistency with incidents etc, but there would need to be some exceptions (hopefully as few as possible). Has anyone tried this or what do others do, any information/opinions would be very welcome.

Thanks
Matt.

There was a thread on this many many years ago. Perhaps time to re-open the discussion?

Thanks for that link Huw some interesting reading, I did raise the issue in the delivery suite yesterday but didn't get a favorable response, perhaps time for a vote to get an opinion?

Why did you get an unfavorable response? I hope you did not suggest that the staff (who are obviously trained to use their equipment) could alter the time themselves!

On a serious note I did see a record of a neonate being given an injection before they were born a while back.

We put a suggestion in that all clinical areas have a radio controlled clock fitted (about £10 from CPC each) but this was seen as too expensive! And a second suggestion that we would set all machines to GMT to avoid the biannual changes.

Lee

Looking back at the previous posts on this subject, there is no mention of the innacuracies of the internal clocks on medical devices. In between PPMs some clocks can lose several minutes so the issue of time recording on the machines can be irrelevant. Last week I had a conversation with the charge nurse on our cardiac ICU about the times on their defibs. He was happy to leave them on GMT but the minutes were out by upto 12 mins.
As for the GMT/ BST thing we tried to force all users to keep to GMT by putting prominent labels on equipment stating "this device is set to GMT" but we found that where the users could change the time, they did. Pagewriters are a good example of this. The ECG department had some on GMT and others on BST, the ones on the wards were left alone.
I think that the users rely on built in clocks too much. They tend to have a simplisitc view of technology and take as fact the messages displayed on their euqipment. I would have thought that it would be very difficult to argue in law that the time depicted on any equipment is acceptable as a de facto record of the time of day corresponding to an actual event. Without being sychronised to a standard clock the times on the devices can only be used as a guide. We fitted a rugby clock to our CICU network in response to a request by the consultant anaesthetist. In doing so our IT bod noticed that the time on the hospital's network servers were all different, by upto six minutes.

Fitting a radio clock presumes that the signals from the new MSF transmitter site at Anthorn is strong enough!

Lee

The comments I got were in relation to D.O.B times and litigation, if I were to put the site on GMT and left CDS on BST and there was a c/section the D.O.B time within the theatre complex would be different to that in CDS etc etc........none of this of course accounts for the differing minutes between the CDS monitors and the clocks in the rooms that are not centrally controlled!, and the entries made in the clinical notes. It could be a never ending battle!

We encountered the problems discussed and the problem of clinical staff using their own incorrectly set watches, (which led us to believe that we could not win!) We then sent out emails, memos etc giving the radio controlled clocks and setting equipment to GMT as our recommendation as the best way forward. The idea being that the clock in each area would be the time reference, regardless of what equipment might print out and should be recorded.

So in the future if there are any issues we can quite happily say “what you didn’t follow our advice?”

Lee

Hi Lee

So where does it stand now then?
I've been asked to put a case forward by the end of the month with all the facts and figures, numbers of equipment affected etc, did you end up putting something similar together? I've now been told it would possibly need to go to the Trust solicitors for an answer.

Cheers
Matt.

Why not leave it to the solicitors, then? Why is biomed involved at all? After all, it's hardly "rocket science", is it?