Heartbeat: Medical engineering – Unsung heroes of the NHS

December 2, 2020

Monitors, diagnostics, medical devices and pumps, they’re all things that keep our patients safe and well when they’re in our care but have you ever wondered who keeps them working, serviced and safe? What goes in to making sure that every medical device does precisely what it’s supposed to do, that unenviable job falls to the electrical and biomedical (EBME) team, otherwise known as the medical engineering team.

Working in a large organisation, where technology has made its way into every single aspect of our lives, we know how frustrating it is when suddenly it does something unexpected or refuses to work. Imagine carrying the responsibility of making sure that life-saving and life sustaining equipment works all the time, everywhere and where a failure could lead to a lost life.

Whilst the members of the EMBE team might be unassuming – quietly working on repairing, servicing and testing equipment across our Trust, the work they do really does make a huge impact. The equipment managed by this team keeps newborn babies alive in the neonatal unit, it keeps patients safe during surgery, and it helps palliative care patients manage their pain. Their work and the impact they have has no bounds.

Recently, the maternity team celebrated the opening of the brand new neonatal unit (NNU), with its bright open layout with perfectly laid out spaces for each baby. What we didn’t mention was how involved the EBME team had been in the development and opening of this unit.

To find out more about the support they had provided the team on the Neonatal Unit, Heartbeat caught up with Advanced Neonatal Nurse Practitioner, Jenny Cadwallader-Hunt. She told us: “The EBME team were instrumental in much of the design and relocation processes for both critical care and the NNU when both services had to relocate to D16 temporarily last year, and again when we returned to the newly refurbished and extended NNU.

“A single baby in our care may have more than 20 medical devices connected to them at any one time, each vital to their care and often their survival. None of this would be possible with the engineers who service them and fix them when we do something wrong or the equipment malfunctions.

“They are a fab team, always willing to help and have exceptional patience with the requests we make. The work they do helps us deliver compassionate care, enabling incredibly poorly babies to spend quality time making memories with their families.”