The geniuses in Engineering

Nurses General Nursing

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Specializes in Nurse Scientist-Research.

So we lost all pressure in our Medical Air outlets the other night. Something about a breaker. Alarms were going off all over and suddenly all the babies that were on oxygen were getting 100% O2. For those not that up on neonatal medicine. . . 100% o2 and premature babies = blindness (ok, not immediately but it's not a great thing). That and turns out the vents really need that medical air pressure to make them work. Soon we were having to manually "bag" all the infants that were on vents. We had gotten portable air tanks to run the fancy vents like the oscillators and jets. What was so amusing was the initial response from our engineering team when we notified them of our problem:

"Just put them on oxygen, that's what babies need is oxygen right?". After a little "chat" with our neonatologist he impressed on the engineering folks the life and death consequences of needing to restore the medical air.

You know, they don't ask me to fix the elevators, don't tell me how to oxygenate my babies.

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100% o2 and premature babies = blindness You know, they don't ask me to fix the elevators, don't tell me how to oxygenate my babies.
Tell me about it! Whilst working in Neurosurg HDU we had a blackout of all our equipment and our O2 & suction stopped working all of a sudden! We called Engineering and they told us it's ok - they'll all have it fixed in 1 hour's time as most of them were out to lunch! NOT GOOD ENOUGH!
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This is absolutely crazy and unsafe. Is Engineering liable in case of a bad pt outcome from this? I thought it would be illegal or violate some JCHAO or Dept of Public Health or some such code for hospital systems necessary for life support and pt care to be messed with without back up ... like, all electrical systems in hospitals on generator back up in case of power outage.

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Specializes in Hospice, Med/Surg, ICU, ER.

Oh Lord!

Has everyone in the healthcare industry, systemically, forgotten the patients? That patient's needs are NOT interruptions of their work but are the reason for it in the first place? :idea:

Darnitalltoheckandback, but what am I getting myself into?

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People crack me up with this stuff. I love when you call another department for something that you know is important and they try to argue with you about whether it's important or not.

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I blame senior managment for the attitude of the engineers... the engineers should be given adequate training on the implications of faulty medical equipment so that they can act appropriately

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