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How often do you have incidents involving Medical devices. What seems to be the main cause ....Equipment failure, Finger-trouble or is it an education issue. Is anyone heavily involved in standardising on particular types of equipment ? Does anyone know of staff training logs being held on wards ? We find infusion devices appear to be the main source of incidents.

We have undertaken a training programme with Alaris. They have trained several "key trainers" who now cascade the training down to all the nursing staff in their area. All the training is logged and everyone is assessed for competence. All the ward training logs and all documentation is from Alaris, but we have used it to record our own training on Graseby products, so it's flexible.
We haven't standardised on a manufacturer, but we have standardised on a particular model of equipment within each generic type. So for volumetric pumps we use the Alaris 572. For ambulatory syringe pumps, the Graseby MS16. For Ward syringe pumps, the Alaris P3000. The Patient Controlled Analgesia pumps are Graseby 3300s. For other equipment we use the HME range of ECG monitors for Ward use and the Welch Allyn vital signs monitor for NIBP (We used to be all Critikon Dynamaps - but our first experience with the Compact made us look elsewhere ! Defibrillators are the Hewlett Packard Codemaster (not my choice ! ) and I can't think of anything else off hand.
We do have incidents - mainly with infusion equipment - and mainly finger trouble, although we have had some serious equipment failures.
Hope that helps.

Thanks for that info Roy, very usefull. I will certainly look into the Alaris training.
Training logs are a definite plus. I am still keen to hear what other people think on this subject.

What is the consensus on reporting incidents to the medical devices agency where there has been no injury to the patient, and no fault on the equipment?
[i.e. User error / Patient observations not recorded properly.]

Sometimes it looks like user error, but is actually a bug in the software which only shows up when someone presses an unexpected sequence of buttons. At least if someone like the MDA are collecting statistics centrally, they should pick up the fact that a certain model is apparently very prone to "user error" and investigate further. You or I might not see the pattern if we only have a few machines (or a few ham-fisted nurses !)
I think we should report every event which involves equipment, regardless of the outcome of the incident. Next time it might kill somebody.

Thankfully not too many incidents involving infusion devices (3 or 4 last year)
However, dare I say it - operator error/not familiar with different devices seems to be the major cause - we're working on it with infusion device training (non clinical!), and standardization of pumps..well, thats the theory..but it all takes time and ££££.