I'm Scott Brown and I work at the Royal Cornwall Hospital as the capital investment manager, where I'm responsible for approaches in medical equipment. So the talk today is mainly around that: it's a strategic replacement programme for patient monitoring across the organisation. So I've been in the NHS about 30 years now; in fact it's 30 years this year in October. I started off as a biomed, done different roles and I’m now in capital planning. But also five years ago I set up a company called Health Tech Solutions, the idea being to do some consultancy work. That’s broadened out into doing training for biomeds and nurses as well. So that'll be celebrating five years this year as well. So, lots of things I've been involved in.
So on to patient monitoring. Start with a slide. I always like to start with a quotation and this one is: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." This is by Albert Einstein. And actually I think this is the ethos of what I'm trying to do with the patient monitoring. We've got patient monitoring at the moment which has got standalone physiological measurements, but all of the other information, as Andrew and other people have said about this morning, is on different systems and they're not all brought together. So if we can bring all of that data to one screen that just makes it so much simpler for the clinician and actually makes it better for the patient. And being better for the patient is why I joined the NHS.
Read more: Patient monitoring: technology adoption and connectivity
Hi everyone. First of all thank you for the opportunity for letting myself and ECRI address you all. This title of the talk we’re giving, I’m using software in a very broad definition. So here we’re talking about software systems, but also online resources, online tools, self-assessment tools and so on. And the idea here is that we actually provide you a lot of these resources free of charge. So this isn’t a sales pitch, but nevertheless I have to give you a quick introduction to ECRI, as not everyone knows ECRI.
So we’re about 50 years old as an organisation. We started off in the US. But we’ve had a European office for 20 years now. We’re not for profit, which doesn’t mean we’re not for money, but we don’t have shareholders or anything like that. And to deconstruct this sentence, independent means we don’t take commissioned work from medical device manufacturers, so our advice and our reports that we can share with you are unbiased and evidence-based. We provide our services, our information to around 5,000 healthcare organisations. So there’s 5,000 customers. They’re generally hospitals. It also includes ministries of health and interesting organisations like department of defence and insurance companies and so on. And, as I’ve said before, I’ll be providing some free of charge, evidence-based, unbiased reports for you at the end of this.
Read more: Using Software to Improve the Effectiveness of Patient Safety & Maintenance Programmes
Ladies and Gentlemen. What motivates us as clinical engineers? You've just had lunch, you're not going to be allowed to sleep, you've got to think! You've got to be there ready for the questions ready that I'm going to pose. That's my first one, but it's actually quite serious: what motivates us as clinical engineers?
A colleague that I worked with for many years was motivated by his mother dying, and experiencing his mother dying and promising on her deathbed that he would help to look after patients as best he could, although he was, as he put it, merely a technician. The dedication and motivation that he had, right up until his retirement, was wonderful to see.
I suspect among the answers to that question will be the desire to support healthcare, and now we don't talk just about healthcare but wellbeing, through the application of medical devices. In this 20 minutes I just want to look at some of the ways, some of the processes involved in supporting healthcare. We need to ask ourselves this as we go through them: how can we as clinical engineers support this? How can we add value? We heard the word 'value' used this morning. Our programme has a subtitle under it, or a title, 'innovations'. We need to think how we can innovate; how can we do things better? Because we all hear about this 'plan, do, check, act' cycle, which implies a regular review.
Read more: Medical Device Governance for Effective and Safe Care
What I'm going to talk to you today about is regulations, guidance, and standards.
What’s it all about?
What I want to try and do is bring some clarity to the difference between regulations, guidance, and standards.
Then I want to talk to you about an important issue for the future that’s coming through in the next couple of weeks.
Now, you may consider this the boring bit, but my colleagues will liven it up a bit later, but there’s an important message here, I hope.
Let’s look at regulations. Regulations are what the law is, but they're always written in very general terms, because most regulations are covering a very broad range of situations.
Usually regulations are followed up with guidance. It can be guidance that’s formal guidance from the organisation that’s been responsible for the regulations. There’s an awful lot of guidance documents from the Health and Safety Executive, for example.
Working for the inventor of the world’s first blood glucose monitor was an interesting experience. I don’t think I’ve ever pricked my finger so many times in my three years that I worked for him. He was a guy who used to… He lived not far from Derby, in the Midlands, and worked out in Australia.
It was a great couple of years, working for an inventor. Everywhere you went, you would always see an opportunity to invent something and make some money out of it.
By now I’m told that, after 15 minutes, caffeine should be now seeping through your veins, reaching a maximum blood concentration of caffeine after about 45 minutes, so it should make a fun time of Dave Mulvey’s question-and-answer session in a little while (Laughs…)
Unfortunately, I’ve not got any slides to make you go, “Ah,” but I have got this one that makes you go, “Oh.” What I’m going to talk about this morning, the role of the clinical engineering department in the organisation, I’m not going to stand up here this morning and teach you to suck eggs. I’m sure you can all do that very well. There’s a lot of experience in this room, and you’ve probably been working in healthcare for many, many years.
Read more: The Clinical Engineering Department's Role in the Organization.
So, I’d just like to thank John for inviting me along to speak at the conference today, and when John asked me to come along, he asked me to present a challenging presentation on Risk and Reliability Centered Maintenance. I feel I’ve kind of dined out on this a couple of times now, so I thought, “What am I going to do to make this a little bit different?” So, as you’ll see on the slide there, I’ve called it ‘a cautionary tale’. Now this is not a cautionary tale about not using Risk and Reliability Centered Maintenance but perhaps more around why you should do it.
So, you need to bear with me here. Once upon a time we had these – now, the sharp-eyed amongst you will have noticed that’s a television set. Well, it was a television set back in the day. That’s probably from around about the late 60s or early 70s. The thing about television sets back in those days was that they were very expensive. They were cutting edge technology of their time. People couldn’t all afford them. And some of you won’t remember a time when everyone didn’t have a television, but there was a time when everyone didn’t have a television, and because they were so expensive, people rented them.
