"Why not?" I replied.
"Because it's sensitive medical equipment that you are not allowed to unplug" she answered.
And these people are supposed to be educated.
What happened was that last night I was called out to a hospital because the sockets had tripped in the orthopaedic theatre and my suspicion was that a faulty appliance plugged into that circuit had tripped the RCBO - so I unplugged all the appliances on the tripped circuit so that I could do a reset.
Maybe it needs to be permanently earthed?
(I'm just trying to find a valid reason).
Were any patients harmed?
Unplugging someone's ventilator is generally frowned upon (unless they're already dead). ;-)
Tim
--
Is that a bit of a wooosssshhh I hear?
Normally critical medical equipment is battery powered, with constant mains charging, so power failure or unplugging simply causes an alarm. Indeed, it is common to see equipment moved into a room, for short term use, without being plugged in at all or patients being moved between parts of a hospital, with monitors and drug drivers still functioning.
Err, no. There is plenty of critical medical equipment that is not intended to be moved, and it relies on mains power which in a hospital should be guaranteed by the standby generator and other failsafe electrical supply.
The circuit breaker has tripped, so there is no power at the socket.
Usually only some sockets (often red) are protected by standby generators. It can take several tens of seconds to start up a large generator. John
Never mind all that. Do wards still have "Ward Sisters"? I thought they were all Charge Nurses or Ward Supervisor or some such.
Doncaster Royal uses a capacitor system so that there is no time lag on the very critical systems.
I saw the smiley.
Then it would not be on a 13A plug
Pretty much correct. I assume that she panicked and forgot there was no power to the socket.
I also assume that she was the one responsible for trying the electric bed that was faulty in every plug in the theatre and knocking out 3 RCBOs.
It's a term of endearment
On 21/11/2024 19:00, Sam Plusnet wrote: ...
The one in a dark blue uniform gets addressed as Sister in my local hospitals. It may vary between areas.
Probably, but there is still the rank of Sister. Most nurses on critical wards like transplant or trauma recovery are Sisters. They're not fat and they're not lazy.
Not many nurses are fat and lazy, and the ones that are tend to be doing the menial duties For real arses you need the admin staff....
Ouch. One way to knock out redundancy...
"You cannot make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious"?
Thomas Prufer
Is that a variaton of the electric chair? How many patients were saved by the fault?
20 years ago I was an IT contractor where the end-user had outsourced it all to Sema Group at Kings X in LOndon.
All the phone systems were supplied by Colt and one friday at 2PM someone unplugged the mains power for fibre optic box owned by Colt telecom, presumably to charge his phone.
Immediately Colt started getting power fail alarms at the local BT exchange where Colt engineers were also located but didn't contact anyone at Sema Group.
The 8 hour BBU duly gave up at about 10PM on Friday so by then noone noticed that *all* incoming and outgoing landline phones were dead. This was only noticed the next day when the Saturday oncall IT contractor tried to dial in from home to check something and the number to gain access to the VAX cluster was dead. He phoned me and I couldn't log in either from home. We reported the fault to BT who passed us over to Colt and they sent an engineer round to the building but was denied entry by the weekend security team because they had not been informed by 'management'. Colt engineer duly left because he had fulfilled his side of the service level agreement and did nothing.
I was on call on Sunday and one of the clients larger telecom billing sites in the Caribbean reported a batch failure which needs a 3 hour fix before escalation. Amazingly I had no way of contacting any of the Sema managers because none of the IT on call group had their Sema managers mobile numbers.
On monday there followed the usual buck-passing witch hunt trying to find someone, anyone to blame.
The real culprit was of course the buildings manager who had allowed unchecked access to the basement telecoms room and allowed a vital bit of kit to be powered from a 3-pin plug and not a fixed fused spur.
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