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Tech World: Trailblazer Enjoys a Job Where No Two Days Are the Same

Tech World: Trailblazer Enjoys a Job Where No Two Days Are the Same

Thu Jul 02 2015By AAMI

 

 

Tech World: Trailblazer Enjoys a Job Where No Two Days Are the Same

 

 

Susan Nossaman is a senior biomedical equipment technician at Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango, CO. She reflects on her more than 30 years of experience in the healthcare technology field.

I started as a biomedical equipment technician in September 1981, and no two days have ever been the same.

I was hired by a hospital in Denver to set up an equipment inventory program after The Joint Commission required one at every healthcare facility. I had experience in computer programming from college, so I wrote a program in a database management system on a computer with one of the first operating systems. The five other technicians in the shop and I then scoured the 400-bed hospital to locate and inventory the equipment. It was a great learning experience to find out how much equipment was in a hospital of that size. My college classes hadn’t prepared me for that!

As one of the first female biomed techs in Denver, I had some great coworkers. In particular, I think the guys in the shop were relieved that I could help them when there were problems with the equipment in the labor & delivery (L&D) department.  Still, when I would call an equipment company to ask for tech support, I would hear “Well, miss, we usually speak with the technicians, not the secretary.” I would have to explain that I was a technician.

After a while, I began to troubleshoot equipment and do repairs in addition to my equipment inventory work. Being a new biomed was really challenging, because I had no experience in soldering or reading schematic diagrams. At the time, circuit boards were a lot less complex, and board-level repair was pretty much expected. I loved the hands-on nature of the work and was happy to be in the medical field helping behind the scenes. Being a doctor or nurse didn’t appeal to me as much as working on the equipment.

I began attending various manufacturers’ training classes after I had been a biomed for about a year. They helped me learn to repair and maintain a lot more equipment than I had before. Technology was changing quite rapidly with the introduction of multilayer-printed circuit boards, microprocessors, and memory. The size of the monitoring equipment was decreasing just as the number of functions they could perform was increasing. The large hospital had enough equipment to allow each technician to specialize.

After more than 10 years at the Denver facility, I returned to the rural area where I had grown up. My father had passed away, and my family and I wanted to be closer to my mother. I started working in a much smaller hospital that was quite isolated geographically. It was just as or even more important to be able to troubleshoot and repair the equipment, because we knew the difficulty and expense of bringing in outside vendors to do the repairs for us.

I was one of three techs, and we were expected to share an on-call rotation. Each of us had to familiarize ourselves with the equipment because we never knew what we’d have to service. This has given me the opportunity to attend training for anesthesia, monitoring, and radiology equipment.

Our department, now called clinical engineering, has worked with other areas of the hospital in tackling problems. One such issue was when we had to install and support an infant security system. We not only worked with the staff in L&D, but we also trained and supported our security and communications departments, both of which interacted with the system.

I enjoy my work—its varied tasks and assignments. I guess the only constant is the paperwork and work orders!

 

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