The Art of Medical Equipment Consultancy

1) The challenge is to establish what the client really wants!

2) Four factors define a project:-

Scope
Budget
Time Schedule
Desired Quality

The consultant must retain influence over at least the last named of these to avoid an endless battle for control of the work.

3) A hospital is a building where the sick, victims of trauma, and the physically indisposed seek cure, repair, relief and comfort. It should not be just another "monument to engineers and architects"!

4) The whole point of the exercise is healthcare - meaning "positive patient outcomes". Continually ask the question "How will this benefit the patient"?

5) This is a business too serious to be left in the hands of "experts" such as architects or doctors!

6) The hospital should be regarded as a system for the delivery of services aimed at bringing patients to full health. Patients are cared for by nurses, not beds! We are dealing with:-

The delivery of health services
Health services are about people
Delivered to people by people

7) The role of the architect and engineer is to provide an environment in which people can deliver health services to people in need; that environment should be:-

Safe
Functional
Comfortable
Pleasant

... in that order

8) What seems clever now may not seem so in ten years time. We seek simplicity, utility and function. Remember (as Mies van de Rohe quite rightly said), often "less is more"!

9) Mechanical and electrical services are provided to bring required services to the places where they are needed to deliver healthcare.

10) The consultant should think like a consultant, not a technician. He should always consider added-value for the client.

11) Always bear in mind the three goals of medicine:-

To cure sometimes
To relieve often
To comfort always

12) Clinical conditions must prevail! But, "Primum non nocere" (first, do no harm!).