What is Life-Support Equipment?

摘要

Determining which medical devices in your facility meet the Joint Commission's (JCAHO's) definition of “equipment used for life support” is important not only for compliance purposes, but also in terms of cost effectiveness.nnAs clinical engineers (CEs) and biomedical equipment technicians (BMETs) are well aware, a single non-compliant life support device may result in a score of “insufficient” during a JCAHO survey. Anything you put on your list of life-support equipment “needs to have 100% compliance with your scheduled inspection and maintenance policy,” says Matt Baretich, president of Baretich Engineering, Inc., a CE consulting firm in Fort Collins, CO. Facilities have an incentive to keep the list as short as possible, he notes. “For almost any medical device it's possible to imagine a scenario in which a failure of the device has an adverse impact on patient care, including loss of life, but that doesn't necessarily mean it falls under the JCAHO definition of life-support equipment.” For example, data from a faulty laboratory analyzer can lead to misdiagnosis and patient harm. However, including too many devices in this category can increase your preventive maintenance costs.nnJCAHO divides medical equipment into two categories: life-support and non-life-support. Life-support equipment is defined as “those devices intended to sustain life and whose failure to perform its primary function, when used according to manufacturer's instructions and clinical protocol, is expected to result in imminent death in the absence of immediate intervention.” The JCAHO standard gives examples of equipment meeting this definition (ventilators, anesthesia machines, and heart-lung bypass machines), but does not provide a complete list.