Biomedical Engineer in Northampton

The post holder will provide comprehensive medical device maintenance, repair, commissioning and management services to a wide range of clinical specialties. Other responsibilities include:

• To assist with the whole life cycle management, support and maintenance of medical devices across Northampton General Hospital.
• Undertake maintenance and calibration of medical devices and update the maintenance.
• Ensure all devices supported by Clinical Engineering operate safely, cost effectively and with minimum disruption to patient care.
• Train and advise nursing and other staff in the safe use of medical devices.

Main duties of the job:

• Perform a wide range of technical duties, mainly guided by procedures involving autonomous work on medical equipment in the clinical and workshop environment to ensure the optimum effectiveness, reliability, availability, and safety of medical devices.
• To commission, calibrate, maintain, and repair a wide range of medical devices e.g., infusion pumps, patient monitors, ECG recorders, defibrillators, etc.
• Investigate and test medical devices, analysing the results to diagnose faults or problems and rectify them.
• Demonstrating equipment operation and techniques to individual users where this is a solution to a problem.
• Communication of investigation results to users, colleagues, and suppliers, sharing knowledge and experience.
• Using primarily computerised systems, make accurate equipment maintenance history records and other information supporting audit, quality, and performance monitoring.

Job responsibilities:

• Liaise with clinical and technical staff to ensure medical devices are deployed and used safely and effectively.
• Liaise with medical device suppliers to obtain technical and commercial information in relation to equipment maintenance and evaluation.
• First line support of instrumentation interfaces to specialist clinical computer systems, liaising with IM&T to resolve problems as necessary.
• Monitor stocks and initiate orders to ensure the timely and adequate procurement of medical device parts and accessories to maintain devices in a serviceable condition.
• Comment on, and propose changes to, departmental procedures.
• Liaise with users and other team members to prioritise and plan own workload to ensure optimum efficiency and in responding appropriately to urgent requests.
• Complete and review equipment and job audits to ensure quality and performance targets are met.
• Contribute to organised training of technical, medical, nursing staff and patients in the proper care and use of medical devices and assessing their competency to do so.
• Participation in rostered on-call or shift system as required to deliver the Clinical Engineering service.
• To play a pivotal role in ensuring governance excellence in the use, training, maintenance, and support of medical devices.
• Analyse complex problems, situations, and information, making informed judgments and formulating solutions and recommendations for the continual improvement of patient safety.
• Conduct risk assessments involving safety issues relating to medical devices.
• Identify equipping deficiencies and ensure that they are fed into the equipment replacement program.
• Communicate to individuals, medical device information which will include policy changes, new policies, guidelines and regulations.
• Provide input where appropriate in any discussions relating to equipment management.
• Communicate with suppliers and all external bodies as necessary.
• Plan, prioritise and organise a range of activities relevant to own remit.
• Provide support to the Head of Clinical Engineering in medical device management across the Trust.
• Utilise and analyse data from audits and provide suggestions that may lead to improvements in management of medical devices.
• Support and supervise junior colleagues or students on placement.
• Contribute to medical device policies and procedures and support the implementation of any changes in these policies.
• Working within Medical Equipment Management Policy framework.
• Contribute to the development of written procedures for all aspects of the work within the medical devices remit.
• Responsible for ensuring that clinical staff are informed of and encouraged to adhere to Trust policies and procedures.
• Responsible for the operation of all manual and computerised information systems relating to medical equipment management which will include Safety Alert Bulletins, Medical Equipment database, Trust wide Medical Equipment Training and policies and procedures.
• Contribute to the formal benchmarking audits programmes both internally and on other sites participating within the scheme.
• Support investigations arising from the Trusts Clinical and Adverse Incident reporting system (Datix).
• The post holder is required to find the root causes of medical equipment failure and report these findings as appropriate to each episode.
• Propose corrective action plan, to prevent reoccurrence.
• Provide cover for colleagues as appropriate.
• Undertake any other duties requested, as appropriate to the banding.
• Maintain own Continuing Professional Development.
• Represent the Trust at appropriate external bodies.
• Maintain expertise in medical device use and safety issues.
• Is responsible for giving advice to users in all matters related to medical devices safety.
• Responsible for scheduling and prioritising own work within area of practice.

Person Specification:

• Qualifications: Educated to HNC/HND, B. Eng or BSc. in a physical science or electronic engineering subject level or equivalent.
• Contemporary knowledge of analogue and digital electronics and associated fault-finding techniques.
• Member of an appropriate professional institute.

• Experience: Experience of providing a maintenance and repair service for a wide range of medical equipment.
• Familiarity with Health & Safety at Work and other related legislation.
• Post qualification technical experience in repair and maintenance of medical equipment.
• Experience in scheduling and providing a maintenance and repair service for a wide range of medical equipment.
• Contemporary technical knowledge in application and use of electro medical equipment.
• Contemporary technical knowledge in the testing of patient connected equipment.
• Experience of undertaking technical/clinical risk assessments on medical devices.

• Skills: Able to use standard office and bespoke software applications.
• Experience in operation and function of equipment and techniques in healthcare.
• Ability to integrate within a team of staff working with a wide range of medical devices.
• Technical/clinical knowledge in medical device technologies.
• Good communication and interpersonal skills.
• Ability to organise own workload.
• Ability to travel between sites in a timely manner.
• Understanding of the principles of risk management and incident investigations and the use of Root Cause Analysis tools.

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.