Oxygen Generators: When Standardization Saves Lives

If you’ve ever visited a healthcare facility in a developing nation you know that access to appropriate, working medical equipment is a huge need. In resource scarce environments, donations can become a primary means of procuring medical equipment. While this process is understandable and sometimes necessary, it does lead to inappropriate equipment, no thought to standardization and what it will take to maintain all of the various donations.

Standardizing equipment not only enhances patient outcomes by enabling staff to become familiar with the equipment, but it can also boost efficiency, enhance patient safety, and decrease waste and costs.

In environments where repair parts are scarce, such as Haiti, standardized equipment allows a broken piece of equipment to serve as a parts donor, potentially repairing multiple other pieces of equipment from the loss of just one.

Recently, our oxygen generation capacity building project in collaboration with FHI 360 and USAID encountered this exact scenario. The sieve bed on one of the oxygen generators cracked, causing zeolite leakage that rendered the oxygen unsafe for patient use. After extensive cost analysis for repairs, we determined it was more practical to designate this generator as a parts donor and we are moving forward with replacing the machine with one more suitable for the environment.

Another location had been down for more than 8 months, with medical oxygen so scarcely available at the best of times the impact of this breakdown was detrimental. Thankfully, with the help of the parts donor machine for troubleshooting and repair, this generator is once again up and running, capable of producing oxygen daily. 

If these machines had not been standardized, all four oxygen generation plants would have soon become inoperable. The standardization of medical equipment not only impacts staff and equipment management systems, it also saves lives.