This week Emily and I finally got back to doing inventory after a long hiatus in the University. While it has been nice and we think we have done a lot of good working with the students and faculty, it is definitely rewarding to get back to our primary task. In two very busy days of work we covered 5 different departments (Dental, Medical Ward B, The Outpatient Clinic, Imaging, and the Lab). All of these departments actually had a substantial amount of equipment, and we ended up needing to use many more tags than we thought we would. We started this week with 193 of 500 tags remaining, but ended our work on Tuesday with only 6. We still haven’t gotten a chance to work in Opthamology, the pharmacy, or Medical Ward A either, and are definitely going to run out of barcode labels.

Fortunately we have a backup label maker and will be able to issue temporary numbered tags to complete the inventory, but we really want to make sure the hospital actually gets barcode tags in the near future. (We should have definitely thought to request a nicer label maker that can print barcodes, but will have to leave that as a suggestion for future interns.) We have observed that the barcodes have given our process legitimacy and have been an important factor in getting department heads to actually allow us to conduct inventory. Apparently partially completed and ineffective inventories have been done in the past, but nothing has come of them and they have only been a waste of time and energy. With the high-quality tags and the database to back them up, we hope that our inventory will actually last and be of long-term use to the hospital.

During our work this week, particularly in the lab, we saw a lot of equipment that will benefit from regular maintenance and repair. The lab has a wide variety of analyzers, incubators, hoods, scales, and other sophisticated test equipment. It looks like the lab has been renovated relatively recently, and there is even a research section managed by the university with filtered air, negative pressure containment, and a changing room. Emily and I went through the majority of our tags in the lab, but are glad we had enough to tag everything there.

We’re working hard to complete the database as quickly as possible too, and we are already testing to find and catch bugs as we go. The program is coming along and already matches all the capabilities of the existing paper inventory, but with search! Things are really starting to come together, and I can’t wait to see the complete inventory information with analysis in the computer in the next few days!