Innocent Usoh
Nashville State Technical Community College
Introduction to Engineering Technology; AC/DC;
Electronics; Introduction to fiber optics; Digital Circuits.

Prof & Lab name: Rick Clark, Clinical Engineering Services 

For my RET program, I worked at Clinical Engineering Services (Biomed) and NOT in a lab. The primary work of clinical engineering services is done by technicians, dealing on diagnostic and therapeutic instruments. Nashville State Technical Community College (Nashville Tech) is a two year community college that awards associate degree in applied sciences. One of the primary functions of Nashville Tech is to train technicians; assigning me to the clinical engineering services served a purpose. It helps me to understand what our graduates who will be working in life science environment will be doing.

I worked with technicians on:

(1) diagnostic tests and calibration of new equipment before they were sent to hospital floors
(2) repairs of existing equipment
(3)  preventive maintenance (pm)
(4) documenting equipment history.

• Using the provided manuals, we were able to pm on dialysis machine. The pm was a routine in order to keep up with the annual maintenance. The tank containers were drained, washed off with appropriate chemicals, and filtered to give 100% pure water suitable for dialysis.
• Calibrated many anesthesia infusion syringe pumps, checked pressure, mm/lb, and rate of delivery to ensure that the readings were within specified values.
• Calibrated “ Procare GE machines” on diagnostic measurements of systolic/diastolic reading of 120/80, temperature ( 96.1)

On repairs, we worked on many instruments, such as:

·        portable radiology X-ray machines

·        OCE 9800 X-ray machine. I recall the problem was the power board was not retaining charge because of battery problem. We had to change the power board. It looked easy after the problem has been diagnosed.  It took awhile. 

We covered the whole of the hospital and instruments were many per day. I have a lot to share with my students.    

Curriculum Summary 

This module is written to be used in ENGT 1000 where I normally teach using problem based case learning approach. The case here is to address some of the problems experienced by individuals as well as in industries which is poor organization and inventory. Companies have seen equipment worth millions of dollar walk away and nobody to give an accurate account of what happened. On the other hand people have been accused unnecessarily of stealing equipment when actually the equipment was misplaced. This project will help students learn how to organize and build inventory.