Thieves strike everywhere, even where you would least expect it. Three weeks ago there was a theft from one of our operating theatres. Yes, you read that right, the place where it is all sterile and the equipment is for surgeons' use in operations.
Here's what they took:
24 Fibre-optic urology scopes (for looking in the bladder and in the ureters, doing tumour biopsies and stone breaking/retrieval). Each one of these scopes is £3,000.
3 Rigid Cystoscopes, about £2,000 each.
2 Flexible fine-calibre ureteroscopes at £18,000 each.
2 Loan scopes from Olympus. (These will have to be paid for by the hospital. They are VERY expensive as they are trial units)
They also took the camera attachments for the scopes (you can feed that into a VCR, thermal printer, or a high resolution colour monitor).
And lastly: they took an anaesthetic monitor (has all the vital monitoring such as heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen saturation, on-board printing and recording of ECG, alarms, and programmable parameters for patient monitoring. Those are about £22,000.
Now, this must tell you that it was likely an inside job (at the very least, someobody told whoever the thief was, what items go with each other, because I don't even know that and I X-ray in there every second day). Add it up:
£72k, + £6k + £36k + £22 = £136,000.
That's just money. I say just money, because the real problem is that patients who were due to be operated on, had their operations cancelled because the equipment wasn't available. Now, considering this has to be an inside job, and a medical or auxilliary medical person is involved, you would think they would at least show a little sensitivity to the needs of the patients and not steal every fukken scope out of our theatre, wouldn't you?
But no, they took the lot. If they can steal that, it shows me that this kind of scum can be found in all circles and all places in society.
