NTW Solutions are responsible for maintaining medical devices across Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust (CNTW). That includes devices which are on our main sites, in smaller buildings and devices which are constantly on the move in the hands of community teams. There are over 5,000 items to maintain and that is made up of a huge variety of different medical devices.
Tracey Sopp, our Managing Director, visited the team, saw some medical devices for herself, and heard how each of them is maintained. This includes a wide range of items including some chairs, and she heard how items are classified as medical devices in the first place. She heard when a standard chair becomes a medical device, essentially when it has moving parts or a mechanism which supports a service user.
NTW solutions took on responsibility for medical device maintenance in April 2023. We were delighted when we were able to recruit John Riddle, a Clinical Technologist, with 30 years of experience who started his career in medical physics at the Freeman Hospital in 1992. That experience really comes into its own when a fault form comes in as John almost always instinctively knows what the fault is likely to be.
John has seen medical devices change massively over the course of his career as new items have been invented as well as many standard items which have been improved massively. There has also been a roll out of items which were uncommon years ago but now are on every ward including defibrillators.
Tracey heard how the job is interesting as John gets out across all our sites and heard that no two days were the same. John explained some of the challenges they have including the fact that keeping track of the devices is quite a challenge in itself. Although there is a process for logging the movement of equipment, sometimes in an emergency it is understandably moved from ward to ward. Equally, lots of the equipment is held by staff who are out in the community and constantly on the move seeing service users across the region throughout the day.
Since taking on the contract NTW Solutions has been working on systematically logging and categorising the devices and integrating them into our compliance systems. These systems can log maintenance schedules and hold all the resulting maintenance reports in one place. This massively increases the assurance we can give on the maintenance of the devices.
Our expertise is being used to increase the efficiency of the system as a whole. For example, we can recommend standardised equipment, sometimes there may be a device we are aware of which is of equal standard but it is cheaper to maintain, or it might be that it needs maintaining less often. Standardised equipment also means that it is easier in terms of training because people can use the same equipment wherever they are based within CNTW.
We have plans for the future development of the service, which could potentially include apprenticeships, to build on the extensive expertise that John has. Ultimately, clinical staff are busy and the service needs to be as un-intrusive as possible and staff just want to know that their devices are well maintained and are there when they need them. The service helps deliver NTW Solutions core mission of Supporting Better Care.