I am the IT manager for a hospital that does not have a biomed department or employee. Before I came on to the team here, the IT department had traditionally been tasked with repairing everything. Computers, phones, bedside monitoring devices, nurse call… Anything that ran on electricity and was more complex than a light switch. I discovered a while back that our state law prohibits anyone not licensed to work on nurse call systems from touching them. It’s been a bit of a fight with both our users and our “guy” who fixed stuff that was beyond the IT department, but I’ve got that off our plate. It took saying “No, we are literally breaking the law if we attempt to fix this” to get it done. This morning we got a call about bedside monitoring devices on one of our overflow floors not working. I tried to say that wasn’t in our purview, but my director vetoed it and said we had to take a look. The issue turned out to be that the staff literally don’t know how to put in AA batteries and flip a power switch, but the point isn’t that we were able to fix it. It’s that we shouldn’t be the ones doing it. TL;DR: My question is, do any of you have similar issues with bedside monitors? I’m uncomfortable with my team being responsible for devices that directly impact patient care. We’re not allowed to touch nurse call and there are several other systems here that we won’t touch and we get the vendors involved because they directly affect patient care. Heck, we’ve got a couple new PCs for designing treatment for our radiation/oncology department, and the vendor doesn’t even want us installing the GPUs ourselves, which is fine. Is there a law about who can and can’t mess with bedside monitors? Am I being ridiculous for not wanting my guys to be put in the position of “who’s the last person that messed with the device that failed to notify us that a patient stopped breathing?” I don’t feel like we get paid enough for that responsibility.
submitted by /u/iammandalore [link] [comments]
Show CommentsClose Comments