Anyone know of a servicing outfit that will service & test spirometers. We have spirometers made by two different companies. Some electronic & one volumetric. They are periodically serviced & tested by their respective manufacturers & regularly volume tested by us. Each manufacturer says their machine is OK. Volume tests (Using the Vitalograph 1 litre syringe) suggest reasonable accuracy (within 1%) However, on actual patient testing, we get variance of up to 10% between machines (usually with the classic Vitalograph (volumetric) machine recording the higher results.
Individual manufacturers will of course say that it must be a fault in the other company’s machine.
My wheeze is to get all tested by the one service engineer who’ll then have to take responsibility for sorting inter-instrument variance.
Know anyone who will grasp the nettle.? Or can anyone explain why we see such variance? Or how we can solve the problem?
I wait, with bated breath for the solution to be posted!
Dr. Alan Swann, BM, AFOM
Director of Occupational Health
Occupational Health Service
Imperial College London
Southside building
South Kensington Campus
London
SW7 2AZ
Tel: +44 (20) 7594 9385
Fax: +44 (20) 7594 9407