Expensive Mistakescoopsweb asks "What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made? Should I mention a certain employee who caused 4 hours worth of delays in Central London and got his company fined £500k?"
No points for stories about the time you had a few and thought it'd be a good idea to wrap your car around a bollard. Or replies consisting of "my wife".
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chthonic, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 11:26)
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Hospital equipment costs!Worked for far too many years in the Theatre Sterile Services Unit at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge.
our job was to collect the instruments from the operating theatres, clean them, re-pack them and sterilize them in whacking great big autoclaves. Was a lovely job, indoors, and the claves used to peak at 136 degrees c so got stunningly hot by around 6.30am! these things ran from 6am to midnight every day not including call-outs.
Anyway, all of the power drills used in theatres are air powered, so have to be washed by hand rather than go through the cleaning machines as they will break.
Over a few years dropped 2 in water resulting in £25,000 of equipment being royally screwed, pulled the hose out of another 4 (Well, you try removing dried blood from a slippery hose using just a jay cloth at 11pm) that had to be sent off and took weeks to repair, meaning we had to hire more to cover the gaps at an eye-watering amount per week.
Opthalmics instruments are as you can imagine very very small. dropping a set on the floor, and then treading on it does not improve the condition of the instruments!
Decent bone screws used to cost £20 - £80 per ONE! so order the wrong pack accidentally and it can get expensive, and the metal plates just cost stupid amounts. Anything remotely scissor / clamp / blade like started at the £100 and most were double or treble, so every tiny drop on the floor that blunted or bent the instrument, or the surgeon didn't like the cut of its jib was rejected, repaired or replaced costing tens of thousands of pounds a year.
You soon see where the money vanishes into the giant maw that is the NHS when a basic operating kit cost £16,000 and we had 30 of them, some of the impressive trauma kits weighed in around the £40-50,0000 mark!
(, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 14:15, 1 reply)
not far awayIn another hospital very near (possibly less than a mile away)I heard that someone has put a whole endoscope through an autoclave twice now. The way it was told I'm guessing this quite an expensive mistake as well.
(, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 15:41, closed)
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