EBME Forums Forums Management Medical Equipment Management Medical equipment lifespan

Sorry, but "Anti-Nurse" is a rather ludicrous statement to make! if it wasn't for nurses experiencing problems with equipment then simply we (SUPPORT STAFF) would be rendered useless and obsolete as a profession! Problems are best solved by many heads coming together! nurses, Biomeds, Suppliers! and whoever who can provide a sensible resolution! Egos and sneering idiots only make matters worse!

Problem in! Problem out!

A half descent engineer (Problem solver) should understand this basic concept!

Ed

Geoff,

As you said earlier, this has drifted off topic. I think that if we want to debate nurse interaction with biomeds, it should be on a new topic.

Medical equipment lifespan....

Maybe we should group by device and agree the MTBF (Mean time between failures) figures for older devices (more than 7 yrs old)

i.e. Our failure rates and repair cost are steadily increasing on our infusion pumps. At what point do we move on? 2% of capital value 5% of capital value (Being spent on remedial maintenance)? or a mix of fact, for expample, including clinical benefits??

Yes, John, that's more like it. The fabled magic numbers:- MTBF and BER (or "Beyond Economic Repair").

For "BER", I have always considered that it's time to think about replacement when (for any particular piece of equipment) the accumulated lifetime maintenance cost reaches 60% of the cost of replacement. This presupposes, of course, that you have those figures to hand! It's the point at which further maintenance expenditure become uneconomic. We can argue about the figure (50%?).

Others say that "beyond economic repair" refers to the estimated one-time cost of a repair (this was how it used to be seen back in the army, by the way). Perhaps they are right, so that's why I like to think more in terms of "continued maintenance uneconomic" (CMU ... yet another acronym? Why not?) whilst using the "formula" I mention above.

MTBF is an interesting one. How many biomed sheds keep records like that, I wonder? In, fact, how do they "define" it? The number of user complaints, number of work orders etc. over a given recent period ... or the number of "actual" failures? If the last criteria is the one of interest, what sort of figure do we have in mind before action (to replace) is triggered? A month, a fortnight? ... three days?

These days I sometimes wonder if uptime (or percentage availability) isn't a more positive figure to report (it always makes more, shall we say, rosey reading)! See also MFOP.

So, first we have to agree terminology, as it were. Which criteria do we use? What figures do we consider acceptable? Let's have the debate (it might even be some help to Mammad out in Malaysia)!

Equipment lifetime? Check out this thread (from a previous life)!

Here's a few more hints:- don't forget that back in those good old days, we didn't have PC's in the LAD's (... if anyone reading this knows what I'm on about, please feel free to join in)! We just didn't have the accumulated lifetime maintenance expenditure figures available to us. So we used the famous BER calculation (as the estimated cost of repair versus the cost of a new one). There was also BLR (plus a few others), but that's all history now.

When I first nosed about in NHS hospitals (twenty-odd years ago now), the notion of BER (plus CES, and all the rest) was, shall we say, very much in its infancy. But, as I've said before, I believe that (in reality) most decent equipment will, in fact, outlive it's usefulness (and will ultimately need to be condemned for some other - non-technical - reason).

Traditionally, MTBF has been to do with predicting the overall reliability of a system when considering the failure rate (theoretical, more often than not) of its component parts. Meanwhile, here's some more. Enjoy!

Surely a combination of considerations should be used. Where equipment has a run time meter, this has been very useful in coming up with MTBF and making comparisons with equivalent equipment. I have used this to replace relatively young equipment which was a lot less reliable than some older kit.
Maintenance costs are also important in making recommendations about replacement. Another reason often cited is clinical usefulness – old equipment may not be capable of the latest techniques etc.

Many (many) moons ago, when I put together a computer system for a project I was involved in, I fitted RS hours-run clocks to each of the major components (the PSU on the computer, one on each Winchester drive, the floppy drive, the damned great big UPS, the printer etc.). In retrospect (apart from my own amusement) it was all a bit of a waste of time ... but the "click ... click ... click" every few seconds or so did help to keep me awake during the "midnight shift"! I think it's known as unintended consequences.

Was it an 8inch floppy and a 9 pin dot matrix printer as well?
Robert
PS The link did not work


Ohh errr Matron
Before any one else comments

Works for me! Try this one, instead.

No, it was a TEAC FD-55 5.25 inch floppy drive. But you're right about the printer. It was an Epson LX-80 (with NLQ - near letter quality, you know)! I also (thoughtfully, I would say) included a 256 K printer buffer (which held 60 pages of text).

To continue ... a couple of years later I bought an LTM "portable" (luggable), and fitted one of my famous hours-run clocks to that as well. It didn't make a lot of difference though, as the display kept failing (twice). It was the power supply that let it down (by Aztec, if I remember rightly). So not a great deal of use when "far from home". After that, I gave up.

Thanks
That one works OK.
The previous one just timed out with error504.
It now works as well.
Oh the joys of the web.
Robert

So, what are your wisdoms about equipment life spans, failure rates, BER, MTBF and all the rest, then, Robert?