Can you spot top health hazards in your hospital? And do you assist your emergency coordinator in conducting accurate hazard assessments?

As ECRI’s upcoming five-day course on environmental management certification approaches, I asked Luke Petrosa, MSc, HEM, HEM-CC, director, center for education & training at ECRI Institute, for one of his course’s best practices in risk management.

One of Petrosa’s top tips: Make assessments a full team effort. “Even if I’m the safety coordinator, I don’t know every nook and cranny and every procedure in the hospital,” he says. “But when I get in there, I talk to the supervisors and to clinical engineers themselves. I get a list of the chemicals they’re using, I watch what they’re doing physically with the equipment, and I look for things that could be hazardous to the fingers, and whether they should be looking for a heavier glove.”

In particular, biomeds can help point out hazards that may not be obvious to others. “In terms of biomeds and clinical engineers, you’ve got electrical, pneumatic, and hydraulic hazards,” Petrosa says. “You have to know what you’re doing—particularly in the case of a capacitor, for example, where it holds an energy charge even though the instrument may be unplugged. You could still be electrocuted and killed.”

Doubtless there are countless more hazards that biomeds encounter every day. Leave a comment and share with us some of the top hazards biomeds should be aware of, and what your hospital (and department) has done to assess and minimize these risks.

Did you attend the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference this year? HIMSS, an organization that focuses on advancing the use of IT and management systems to improve health care, highlighted a clinical engineering symposium and stated, “The environment of change is upon clinical engineers. Those taking proactive steps to understand the new rules and incentives, and to prepare for their impact, will be best positioned for the future. Clinical engineering and IT must design a seamless service and technology support system.”

What was the Interoperability Showcase like? Did you see any innovative technologies? What helpful ideas did you take away from the clinical engineering symposium or the overall conference? We hope you’ll connect with your colleagues here to share your experiences.

   

When the discussion rolls around to certification, it always brings comments from every end of the spectrum. Recently, writer Greg Thompson spoke with Biomedtalk listserv founder and a member of 24x7’s editorial advisory board Michael Kauffman, CBET, assistant director of facilities at the Reading Hospital and Medical Center, Reading, Pa, and got his views on this subject. We invite you to comment on this blog and add your ideas on the topic—is it important as the profession moves forward? Can the profession come to a unified agreement?

24x7: In these economic times, is certification, or credentialing, a good use of scarce resources?

Michael Kauffman: I support credentialing and I like to see it. We actually pay a little bit more to credentialed personnel. It is one of the steps that an employee here has to reach prior to getting to the top of the payroll. I think it is important, and I think biomeds are wrong for not uniting and agreeing on that fact.

24x7: Some biomeds say credentialing is overrated. How do you respond to that? 

Kauffman: Credentialing is certainly more book study than anything. You could just book study to become a certified biomedical technician. It’s not the same as being trained to repair a ventilator, for example. You can’t learn that from a book.

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J. Scot Mackeil, a CBET in Plymouth Mass, recently sparked some conversation on the Biomedtalk listserv regarding credentials for BMETs. He acknowledged right off the bat it can be a sore subject but he has been working on an article on this topic and said he has been struggling with seeing the other side of this coin—what do we gain by being uncertified and unregulated?

We invite your comments—what do you think?

Scot said: “Fellow biomeds, consider this, aircraft and medical equipment are devices on which peoples’ lives depend. In some cases, hundreds of lives can depend on a single piece of hardware. In order to repair and sign off on the repair of an aircraft or sign off on an annual inspection, one must be must be a certified airframe and power plant mechanic. The qualification process for an A+P makes the CBET or CCE look like 5th grade. These professionals, their training, support, and qualifications are strictly regulated by the FAA. No pilot would ever think of taking a jet off the flight line with an expired inspection sticker on it or not complying exactly with maintenance and repair reporting protocols. Why is the manner in which medical equipment maintenance in health care implemented and practiced, almost completely the reverse of the airline industry?”

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