Hospital grade power strips
Joint Commission survey reports from other Hospitals are highlighting a focus on patient grade plug in power strips. This code required element of NFPA 70 and NFPA 99 has gone on as a sleeper paragraph for several years. Work to complete exchanges of these units will address procurement, receipt, bar code labeling, (these require follow-up maintenance testing), Maximo assignment, location assignment where possible, etc. University Hospital estimates they have 2500 to 5000 of these in use which may require 2-3 man-years of effort. Follow up on maintenance items of this nature are a challenge as they are so portable.
Bob is open to labor from any source, i.e. internal or external. I shared with him how we have completed recent ECM projects for building lighting (bulb changeouts/some with a higher level cold room complexity) on campus with MM’s, preserving our assignment of core maintenance work, by only allowing the building lighting work to be done on OT, which was still an overall savings to the projects value as the work was estimated at electrician wages, etc. We also discussed putting together an expedited third party vendor contract.
The commercial availability of these items is going to be in question as Hospitals in the JC triennial cycle flock to purchase them. This may or may not be an issue, some of us remember the latex glove concerns of a decade or more ago. These are not disposable items as the gloves were. We will most likely eventually want to forward specifics on these outlet strips to Madison Electric for their possible procurement idea’s, estimated pricing, etc. The Hospital procurement group is looking to conversations with Grainger at this time for hospital grade surge protection. Triplight and Levitron were two cited sources, (right click below- go to…)
Priorities for service exchange are being set. Weather or not we can get all of this done before our survey is certainly questionable, if components are available.