David Dunning, Marketing executive at Hilditch, which specialises in selling unused and surplus medical equipment for the healthcare sector, discusses when may be the best time for healthcare providers to repair, replace, or sell such 'kit'.
Hilditch’s services include clearing hospital sites of surplus or unused medical equipment and re-selling it, and he also describes how the company facilitated the resale of a large volume of unused specialist medical, commercial catering, general site, and facilities equipment, ‘left over’ following the transfer of staff and medical facilities from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ site of The Balfour Hospital on the Orkney Islands.
The question of when to replace your medical assets is not an easy one, and there are a lot of factors to take into account. For every piece of equipment there is invariably a fine balance between annual maintenance costs, what the item would be worth if it was sold, and the price to replace the item new. A medium-sized hospital of around 200-400 beds will often possess more than 20,000 medical devices, with a lifespan per item, on average, of 5-10 years. Obviously, equipment is not replaced all at the same time, which means that there is a constant flow of equipment coming into a hospital, and a similar sized ‘river’ of equipment going out. This is, however, a very generalised estimation, as bed count is not a good rule of thumb to estimate the value of medical assets and establishment possesses. Take into account specialist clinics like eye hospitals, for example, that have no beds, but a lot of high-value equipment.
The tipping point
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