Investment in calibration services is delivering benefits for University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, which has harnessed Calibrationhouse’s expertise for over 10 years to calibrate of hundreds of items of specialist medical electrical test equipment.
One of England’s six largest, The trust employs over 12,000 staff, treating more than one million patients annually across three sites – Leicester Royal Infirmary, Glendale Hospital, and Leicester General Hospital. Medical equipment expertly calibrated for it by Calibrationhouse includes Rigel Medical and Fluke Biomedical-manufactured defibrillation analysers, patient simulators, and ventilator testers. The service – with access to skilled engineers operating from a fleet of technical vehicles – sees the provision of specialist UKAS calibration services on site at the Leicester hospitals, supported by ‘state-of-the-art’ laboratory facilities in County Durham.
As part of an ongoing contract, engineers recently calibrated 170 units on site at the three hospitals in under five days. Calibrationhouse says this work provides the Trust with ‘significant equipment service and maintenance cost savings, on the back of a high-quality industry standard compliant service’. Many medical device testers, such as those used on defibrillators, ECGs, blood pressure monitors, and electrical circuits, are tested on site. Additionally, dozens of items used to check infusion pumps, ventilators, and anaesthetic machines, are sent to Calibrationhouse’s Peterlee laboratory for extensive checks during calibration checking, before being quickly returned to service.
This ongoing partnership ensures the Trust’s compliance with MHRA (the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) regulations for medical device test equipment, and ISO17025:2017 – covering general requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories. The organisation’s Medical Physics technician and Calibration lead, Ian Collier, believes Calibrationhouse offers ‘one of the fastest, most comprehensive, and cost-effective, precision instrumentation services available in the UK’. He said: “The ability to carry out on-site calibration is really beneficial to our activities and the wider Trust, meeting the requirements of a busy hospital environment, where resources and equipment must be readily available and performing optimally at all times. Indeed, over many years the service has continued to meet and exceed our needs, saving us a small fortune in service and maintenance costs. It also allow me to spend less time on managing calibration procedures, and more on other areas of operations.
“Calibrationhouse’s service is reliable and flexible enough to accommodate a vast array of demand and tester types, while allowing us to send any number of testers at one time to its County Durham lab. It’s also flexible enough to accommodate any unscheduled or unforeseen changes in the type of instruments they are expecting to calibrate.”
