That's very oversimplified.
Used to live in Norway when I joined reddit, and the whole Norse lore resonated with me. Back then I had a number attached, that wasn't needed on Lemmy anymore.
If you read the reviews on the play store, it seems like people get banned left and right for posting factual truth. So much for "freedom of speech". Not like anyone expected that in the first place from a fascist echo chamber, but hey.
Does it have a dark mode? I used the website mostly which is alright, but tried the app when they announced it a couple days ago, and that was my first issue.
I can't speak for Terumo, in my books this has always been an issue, so maybe their management assessed how many casualties resulted out of poorly maintained machines and decided that enough is enough.
I've explained in a bit more details further down in the comments, the liability issue stems from the fact that people can (and do!) die due to wrongly maintained machines, and this falls back on the manufacturer, since they are the ones who trained the technician who then "certified" the machine. But given that they only do one maintenance run every half year or so, they are far from experts. So either you re-train them once a quarter (during training they work on actual machines that have been modified to throw certain errors, and give them hands-on training to fix it); or you do it yourself. Training usually takes 2 days since there's quite some theory to cover before the practical stuff; and the training usually happens in our HQ, so include 2 travel days.
If hospital staff is missing 4 days per quarter for one device maintenance workshop, imagine how this will look like if there are 10+ machines they need to be comfortable working with that follow similar re-certification routines. Those people would be gone for 40+ days over a 90 day period. If you account for weekends and time off, they'd essentially be at work for maybe 2 weeks, and someone would have to be on call during the time for other machines in need of maintenance, so you'd end up having to hire 10 times the number of technicians just so that someone is always at work if and when needed.
If it was, that reply probably wasn't coming from me. Unless I'm tripping.
As it's written in the contracts, I assure you. And yet that's not as clear as day when it ends up in court, since hospitals hardly accept liability without going through all instances. Add negative press to the mix, and you got a nice shitshow going, which is harmful for patients (going crazy for having to undergo already risky treatments with device that's now considered faulty to some degree), the hospital staff (who faces potential charges up to involuntary manslaughter), and of course also the company that suffers from negative press (reputation and possibly financially).
If all of that can be avoided if certified technicians on the company payroll can do the maintenance, I'm not sure that's all bad.
A malfunctioning device during open heart surgery means a high risk including potential death to the patient.
Liability = responsible for someone's death.
The consequence would be a potential settlement with their family, negative publicity and whatever might negatively affect the financial bottom line, granted. But believe it or not, we actually care about patients surviving.
I work for a company that manufacturers a comparable product to the cited Terumo device, and I can tell you that it's most likely not greed but pending liability issues.
Those devices aren't in use 24/7, and only need maintenance every 15 uses, so hospital staff trained to work on them get to use their maintenance knowledge like 3-4 times a year, at most. And since there must be a redundancy in the hospital both with machines (1 replacement on hand per 1 in use) as well as staff, this number even goes down since you alternate machines (thus stretching their use without maintenance) and people (so they both get to use their experience).
As a result, you end up with machines that are maintained by certified, yet unprofessional technicians. But since the device ends up with an 'error free' log, if anything were to happen to a patient due to a malfunction, the manufacturer assumes liability; and would then have to try and prove that it's actually a human error by the technician.
The alternatives are either to establish crazy tight recertification windows for the technicians (like every 60-90 days), which is also costly and very annoying for them, and puts a serious strain on hospital staff if all manufacturers were to implement similar mechanisms, or, well, maintain the machines themselves. That way the technicians are better equipped due to doing the same steps routinely, and liability lies with the manufacturer either way.
Not everything is evil corpos at work, sometimes there are actual reasons for certain decisions.
If you don't have one yet, take this as a cue to get a powerful (!) blender. You can literally chuck every meal ever in there, either individually (sides, main, salad) or as a whole.
Wise words. Another one for the block list.
Excellent, thanks!