National Public Health Week and Reflecting on the Need to Ensure Patient Safety

Last week, we observed National Public Health Week – a campaign whose mission is to advance health equity, improve community well-being and champion policies that protect and promote public health. This observance also serves as a reminder to highlight the often-overlooked heroes of our healthcare system: properly maintained medical devices.

In the bustling corridors of a typical U.S. hospital, between 10 and 15 medical devices per bed work relentlessly to save lives. Consider a 1,000-bed facility: up to 15,000 life-saving tools—from imaging and clinical Internet of Things (IoT) devices to surgical instruments—form the very backbone of modern medicine. These devices are helpful and essential for accurate diagnoses, effective treatments, ongoing patient monitoring and maintaining public health.

Medical devices are often taken for granted—going unnoticed until something goes wrong. Thus, patient safety depends on informed attention and action across all levels, including legislatively.

As discussions around the issue of a consumer’s right to repair continue to grow among policymakers and a diverse group of stakeholders, we must not overlook the risks this movement brings to medical devices.

While enabling consumers to repair their products encourages innovation and may lower costs in some cases, we must proceed cautiously. Extending these rights to medical devices may jeopardize patient safety. Careful consideration is vital in the delicate field of medicine, where lives hang in balance.

We must stay alert to ensure these regulations exclude medical equipment.

Every decision affecting the technological support systems utilized daily in hospitals must prioritize patient safety.

National Public Health Week is a key reminder of the crucial role that medical devices play in every patient’s treatment and recovery journey. It highlights our shared responsibility to ensure these tools remain safe and effective through thoughtful right to repair policies that keep medical devices exempt.