Introduction: The complexity and range of medical devices has grown exponentially. A 350 bed hospital will have +1200 different makes and models of devices. As patients gets older , treatments become more complex and the value placed on clinical data collect , more important the impact of user competence and the technology they use increases .
Problem: The ability of nurse educators to ensure they get to all medical devices users with respect to product specific training is labour intensive. With respect to Clinical Engineering Departments – “no fault found” and “user error” make up a noticeable number of the work requisitions logged – estimates are 5 - 10 % of their work load. The current situation is one which results in a increase in the TOC of medical devices either as clinical staff and or biomedical technicians time. Medical device incidents are also directly related to serious patient incidents.
Our Solution: BioClinical Services introduced the Clinical Equipment User Manual Library into Australia in 2008 – this is a hospital based, intranet accessible database of Manufacturer supplied , Product Specific information which all medical devices users can access 24/7 at the point-of-care, both nursing and medical staff as they are equally responsible for ensuring they know how to use and correctly interpret information from and displayed when using these devices .
This service is currently part of the New South Wales Health Support Services CiAP clinical resources portal (www.ciap.health.nsw.gov.au)
See www.bioclinicalservices.com