The frustrations of altruism in equipment services…
In our business, we often find ourselves with unwanted community equipment on our hands, which we always donate to charity. Frustratingly, though, this is becoming more and more difficult, due to over-officious policies and inexperienced people in procurement roles…
We’ve recently tried to donate some clinical beds to a couple of charities but have found brick walls, solid with fear and suspicion. The compatibility of equipment has become an issue as members of clinical staff are trained on more and more sophisticated equipment and charities and hospitals are aiming to standardise equipment. With increasing sophistication comes the requirement for maintenance of equipment, but of course, legislation requires all equipment to come with a service history, so maintenance should actually never be a problem.
Often, however, for an inexperienced and untrained procurement officer, it is far easier to order a brand new clinical bed out of a catalogue, rather than take a perfectly maintained, nearly new, state of the art ‘pre-loved’ model into the stable.
Sadly, more and more perfectly good, modern and maintained community equipment is being scrapped…