Mineral Community Hospital receives new equipment
SUPERIOR – The Mineral Community Hospital recently acquired a new set of beds and brand new lab equipment that will improve their ability to diagnose and treat their patients.
According to John Updike, chief operating officer of MCH, the 25 beds were given to the hospital by the Kootenai Medical Center in Coeur D’Alene. While not brand new, the beds are in excellent shape and will be good for supplementing their current beds.
“They’re a great boon because if you have the same bed in most of your rooms and parts for them, then when they don’t work … you can fix the bed and take care of them,” said Updike.
Last week, MCH sent a group to Coeur D’Alene with trucks to collect the beds and bring them back. Updike said some of the beds will be put in rooms within the hospital and others will be used for maintenance parts. Some will even go to members of the community who need hospital beds or be donated to charitable organizations that send medical supplies and equipment to third-world countries.
Updike said it is a common practice for hospitals, clinics and health centers to send old supplies abroad. According to Updike, American medical regulations say certain items can only be kept for a certain period of time, despite the product still being usable, so many establishments opt to send the items to places where they can still be used.
Once they arrived and were unloaded, the new beds were attacked by the maintenance and housekeeping staff to make sure each bed was usable and clean. The beds, completely stripped to the frames, filled some hallways as they waited to be put in a room. According to Updike, new beds were being installed into some rooms as soon as the patients left them.
Updike said around 20 of the beds will be split between the nursing home on the south side of the hospital and the hospital itself. The old beds the hospital is replacing will be posted online where other hospitals and services can offer to buy them. Updike said members of the community needing hospital beds at home may contact MCH to request one. These beds will be sold in their current condition with MCH staff teaching the new owner how the bed works.
MCH also recently got new lab equipment in the form of a LED microscope and a Chemical Analyzer. Both new devices will help the hospital improve the lab work involved in diagnosing patients and preparing treatments.
According to Sara Buchanan, a medical technologist at MCH, the new microscope’s LED lighting allows them to see clearer images and shows more detail within a cell.
“That way we can see the cells better and identify issues with patients a lot better,” said Buchanan.
What she said was true; looking through the microscope at a slide of blood cells, the details were crisp and sharp. The interior of a white blood cell, the important part to see according to Buchanan, was very clear and detailed.
According to Buchanan, there were some complications in getting the microscope. Due to the federal government shutdown the microscope’s trip from the makers in Germany to Superior was delayed in customs for three weeks. Buchanan assumes that with the shutdown no one was available to look over items being shipped in.
The Chemistry Analyzer is “critical” for patients. According to Buchanan, the machine can check all aspects of the body’s chemistry. The new machine runs more efficiently and has a better computer system.
“With the old one, we really had to fight with it a lot,” said Buchanan.
The inside of the machine looks complicated, with a centrifuge, robot arms and belts of chemical packets visible. According to Buchanan, using robotics the Analyzer can take samples and apply testing chemicals to them. It then detects any color change and uses a laser to measure how much light passes through the sample. This tells the technicians how much of a given chemical is present in the body.
“Everything’s a lot more automated on this [machine], as opposed to the other one where we were doing a lot of manual testing,” said Buchanan.
The new machine does not add any new testing abilities to MCH, though Buchanan said if they needed to the hospital would be able to add new tests into the Analyzer’s capabilities.
The new pieces of equipment should help the MCH lab in their abilities to investigate and evaluate a person’s condition. Buchanan said she is very happy to have received the new machines.
“I feel like we are able to provide better patient care with these two pieces of equipment,” said Buchanan. “I’m more confident about what I’m putting out there and it makes me a better tech and it makes the patients happier.”