Biomedical Engineering Profession – An Overview and Global Comparison of Staffing Criteria and Workforce

Abstract

Introduction: Biomedical Engineering is a specialized profession that incorporates engineering, science, technology, and medicine competence and responsibilities. A biomedical engineer who works at hospital and manages the biomedical engineering department by integrating all the health care technologies for patient safety is called a clinical engineer.Methodology: Rapid literature on the workforce as well as staffing criterion has been done by searching in PubMed, google scholar and relevant websites.Results: Variations in the staffing criteria exist across all the world. There are multiple staffing criterions put forward by various health system agencies. However, a standardised staffing criterion is lacking in many countries. The conventional staffing pattern developed primarily on the basis of number of patients needs to be modified by incorporating multiple components such as the nature of care delivery, number of biomedical devices used, average number of maintenance work orders received etc. The procurement and maintenance of biomedical devices are often get disrupted in developing countries due to inadequate staffing. Low-income countries depend on donations for procurement of medical devices, however most of these devices will stop working within a period of 5 years due to lack of maintenance.Conclusion: Developing an appropriate job description specific to the county and adopting a standardised staffing pattern could contribute immensely to the medical workforce as well as improving the quality of medical care.Manuscript HighlightsThis paper provides an overview of considerations used to develop staffing criteria for biomedical engineers across the globe. The paper also does a multicounty comparison on biomedical workforce published by the World Health Organisation in order to determine the various factors to be considered for developing a staffing criterion. High income countries like Australia, Canada and USA follows standards according to their requirements whereas the LMICs doesn’t follows a framed criterion. The paper discusses various models available in place which are used by various health administrative agencies to consider developing and regulating the staffing standards of biomedical engineers in their respective regions. The paper examines the health regulations considering the biomedical engineer staffing criterions developed by regulatory and administrative agencies from different countries. Based on all these analyses, recommendations are made on criterions to be considered for developing staffing pattern and implementing regulatory body for biomedical engineering profession.