22 Mar
2006
22 Mar
'06
2:10 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 3/22/2006 at 2:00 PM Richard wrote:
Yup. A fair bit of "surplus" medical equipment here has been
shipped off to tsunami-stricken areas, other parts of the world
"less fortunate", etc.
It's rare that things actually "wear out". Rather, someone gets
an endowment/grant and opts to upgrade their equipment. Often,
there are strings attached to the original purchase which
prevent it from being sold, outright. So, the easy ways of
disposing of it are through auctions (cumbersome -- especially
if you only have a few pieces) or donations to charity (which
almost always "satisfy" any original stipulations made in the
purchase)
You want to be wary of medical surplus since you have no idea
*what* it was used for... X-(
So what do hospitals do with all that gear that
they've had in
pristine lab conditions for years when they upgrade and no longer need
it?
I've never seen any sort of surplus venue for this sort of thing.
They probably use the equipment for as long as practical, then pass it on
for shipment out-of-country. I recently got a diskette sample from a CT scanner running CP/M 68K and very much still in use.
You see the same
situation in high end computer-controlled machine tools.