[Improvement of medical equipment setting for the hospital link of the medical service during wartime].

One of the priorities of the military health care is to improve the system of rationing medical equipment for the hospital unit of the medical service of the Armed Forces in wartime. This is determined the fact that the effectiveness of measures to provide military field hospitals with medical supplies depends on the quality of medical care for the wounded and sick, as well as the level of their return to duty. The article presents the characteristics of modern standards medical supplies procurement of military field hospitals included in the new regulatory legal act of the Russian Federation Ministry of Defence--"Standards of supplies medical supplies medical and pharmaceutical organizations (units) of the Russian Federation on the wartime armed forces", approved and put into effect in 2015 by order of the Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation.

Hospital effluents management: Chemical, physical, microbiological risks and legislation in different countries.

Hospital wastewater (HWW) can contain hazardous substances, such as pharmaceutical residues, chemical hazardous substances, pathogens and radioisotopes. Due to these substances, hospital wastewater can represent a chemical, biological and physical risk for public and environmental health. In particular, several studies demonstrate that the main effects of these substances can't be neutralised by wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). These substances can be found in a wide range of concentrations due to the size of a hospital, the bed density, number of inpatients and outpatients, the number and the type of wards, the number and types of services, the country and the season. Some hazardous substances produced in hospital facilities have a regulatory status and are treated like waste and are disposed of accordingly (i.e., dental amalgam and medications). Legislation is quite homogeneous for these substances in all industrial countries. Problems that have emerged in the last decade concern substances and microorganisms that don't have a regulatory status, such as antibiotic residues, drugs and specific pathogens. At a global level, guidelines exist for treatment methods for these effluents, but legislation in all major industrial countries don't contain limitations on these parameters. Therefore, a monitoring system is necessary for these effluents as well as for substances and pathogens, as these elements can represent a risk to the environment and public health.

Bone products in surgery: a blueprint for standardization.

Surgical facilities often stock many types of bone and bone products to meet the needs of multiple surgeons. In this era of cost containment, product standardization is necessary for the financial well-being of health care facilities. By familiarizing themselves with bone and bone product harvesting and processing and the US Food and Drug Administration requirements for approval of these products, perioperative nurses and managers can more easily standardize the bone and tissue products stocked and reduce costs. Steps toward standardization include establishing a multidisciplinary surgical product use committee to evaluate products used in the OR, limiting the number of tissue vendors for the facility to as few as possible, completing a product inventory to identify what is currently available, and constructing charts to share with surgeons that provide the rationales for standardizing products.

Why it pays to 'grill' your supplier.

When it comes to ensuring that your cold storage operation and maintenance meets MHRA requirements, it pays to ensure that your service supplier knows what it is doing. So says Joe Fudge, instrumentation service manager for ABB's instrumentation business in the U.K., who outlines some of the key factors to consider when selecting a supplier of cold chain mapping services.

Clearing the way to healthy returns.

Health Estate Journal discusses with medical auction specialist Hilditch Group how Trusts and other healthcare providers can safely and gainfully dispose of, at auction, equipment no longer required, discovering how both buyers and sellers can benefit.

Traceability in healthcare: crossing boundaries.

OBJECTIVES: This paper is a survey on the problem of traceability in healthcare. Traceability covers many different aspects and its understanding varies among different players. In supply chains and retails, traceability usually covers aspects pertaining to logistics. The challenge is to keep trace of objects manufactured, to track their locations in a production and distribution processes. In food industry, traceability has received a lot of attention because of public health problems related to infectious diseases. For instance, in Europe, the challenge of traceability has been to build the tracking of meat, from the living animal to the shell. In the health sector, traceability has mostly been involved in patient safety around human products such as blood derivates contaminants or implanted devices and prosthesis such as mammary implants. There are growing interests involving traceability in health related to drug safety, including the problem of counterfeited drugs, and to privacy. Traceability is also increasingly seen as a mean to improve efficiency of the logistics of care and a way to better understand costs and usage of resources. METHODS: This survey is reviewing the literature and proposes a discussion based on the real use and needs of traceability in a large teaching hospital. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Traceability in healthcare is at the crossroads of numerous needs. It is therefore of particular complexity and raises many new challenges. Identification management and entity tracking, from serialization of consumers' good production in the supply chains, to the identification of actors, patients, care providers, locations and processes is a huge effort, tackling economical, political, ethical and technical challenges. New requirements are needed, not usually met in the supply chain, such as serialization and persistence in time. New problems arise, such as privacy and legal frameworks. There are growing needs to increase traceability for drug products, related to drug safety, counterfeited drugs, and to privacy. Technical problems around reliability, robustness and efficiency of carriers are still to be resolved. There is a lot at stakes. Traceability is a major aspect of the future in healthcare and requires the attention of the community of medical informatics.