I don’t know about you, but I rarely noticed a medical machine unless it was malfunctioning. That is, until recently when I visited the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, and heard nurses and other healthcare professionals talk about their involvement in ensuring medical devices are safe for patient care and engineered to make sense for providers’ daily use.

I’ve never thought about healthcare professionals having my back and going over medical machines and devices with a proverbial fine-toothed comb. It was refreshing to hear. I now look at medical machines differently. Whether new or used, these tools help us do our jobs; they are beside us day-in and day-out; they lift, clean, turn, pump, pulse, measure, analyze, report, print, cradle. They help heal. They improve our efficiency…yes, even when we think otherwise!

The next time you look for a pump, add instruments to an autoclave, connect a patient to a pulse oximeter, print an EKG strip, measure a set of vital signs with the touch of a button, or save your back by raising and further adjusting a patient’s bed, think of what modern nursing would be like without these patient care tools and the people who develop, evaluate, sell, ship, inventory, and maintain these modern marvels. It’s pretty amazing.

Disclosure: This article is sponsored by Medical Machines Online.