Every piece of equipment your agency buys is an investment in both the long-term growth and viability of your company and the health of the people you serve. This latter piece of the puzzle can be difficult to quantify. After all, it’s hard to assign a value to saving and improving lives, greater effectiveness among your employees, and in many cases, reduced workplace stress and trauma. Yet every agency must operate under budget constraints, acting as good stewards of whatever budget they have. So how much should you invest in portable suction machines? As with most expenditures, there’s no single figure or percentage that will apply to every organization. Here are some factors to weigh when making your purchase.

Tachycardia can be a sign of respiratory distress. It can also be a complication of interventions to treat respiratory distress, including suctioning. First responders and medical providers must have a clear understanding of the link between tachycardia and suctioning so that they can reduce the risk of patient injuries and improve both long- and short-term outcomes.

Prehospital suctioning of critically ill patients is a core skill that all first responders must master. Before the advent of suction machines, patients were faced with the terrifying realities of inadequate or nonexistent suction. Now, first responders have a number of options.

Portable suction failure is a major contributor to patient morbidity when first responders otherwise follow correct protocol. A 2013 study published in Prehospital and Disaster Medicine assessed the rate of portable suction failure over two years in more than 9,500 portable suction units. Overall, 2.4 percent failed. This suggests that two in every hundred patients got inadequate care instead of potentially life-saving, prompt suction.

The right portable suction machine is an integral part of patient care. Although most people charged with hospital purchasing are aware of the role of wall-mounted and non-portable suction in patient wellness, they may not consider the importance of portable suction. Before you make this important purchase, here are five facts you need to know.

A medical aspirator that fails to function can do serious harm. Even if the device doesn’t harm patients, it delays treatment, increasing morbidity. Inadequate suction is a major factor in aspiration and hypoxia. 

SSCOR’s free medical aspirator test kit offers a cost-effective, efficient way to minimize the problem of non-functioning suction devices.

A portable suction device is an indispensable part of your emergency medical kit. Airway management can save lives following drowning, traumatic injuries, respiratory infections, and numerous other injuries and ailments. The right portable suction device saves lives. The wrong portable suction device can be a source of endless frustration and may even injure patients’ airways.

As every first responder eventually learns, preparedness saves lives. Mass casualty incidents (MCIs) are increasingly common, with more than 14,000 such events documented in EMS databases in the 2010 National EMS Database of the National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS).