To dispose or re-use?--an evaluation of sluice room equipment

From my own experience at this hospital, I would recommend disposable bedpans and macerators as the system of choice for hospital sluice rooms for the following reasons: (1) It saves engineering time. The machines are much simpler to maintain than bedpan washers, and the time spent is purely on mechanical maintenance or repair rather than on monitoring of performance. I estimate that our fitters spend less than half the time on maintenance or repair of macerators than they did on bedpan washers. (2) It is safer. With a macerator, when a machine failure does occur it is complete and results in an emergency call to the engineering department. With a bedpan washer, the danger is that the machine failure, ie problems with the washer arm or failure of the machine to reach disinfection temperature, will not be complete and will go unnoticed. This presents an infection control hazard, and it is inevitably considered to be the responsibility of the hospital engineers if things do go wrong. There are of course other factors to be considered when choosing sluice room equipment, such as saving of nurses time, saving of energy, cost of disposables etc. But these are part of a wider debate and not the sole concern of the unit engineer. I choose only to offer the benefit of my own experience in the installation repair and maintenance of both systems, and hope that it will be of value to other engineers.