Medical Technology - Policy Perspective

World Health Organization (WHO), of course, see medical technology from a policy perspective, imagining Ministry or Department of Health officials sitting in their offices, or perhaps hospital directors and medical consultants looking at their budgets … and asking, how can we manage technology commissioning?

For WHO, technology commissioning for healthcare has phases…

·         Assessment – Do we really need this?

·         Selection – If so, what’s best for us, given our situation?

·         Procurement – Where do we get it from? At what cost?

·         Management – Can we maintain it? What cycles of maintenance are necessary?

·         Training – Does anyone in our facility actually know how to use it?

·         Use – Even if we do know how to use it, do we actually make use of it?

Irreversible breakdown and disposal are missing from this list.

Underlying WHO thinking is a belief that technology is a relationship between medical experts (such as doctors, consultants, midwives, nurses and so on) and medical engineers and technicians. You can see an example of this thinking on youtube WHO The Power and Potential of Medical Devices.

WHO seem to be assuming that the patient is passive – acted upon by various medical expert and devices, and perpetuating a common medical myth, I would say, that patients are not active in their own care. We have to see patients as active participants in their own care – plenty evidence from medical anthropology supports this conclusion.

However, my interest is not in policy rather design and use of technology, so let’s return to the Breath of Life story…