Interview with a Medical Device Engineer

Pleased to share the transcription for an interview I did for Vital Signs magazine, a publication by and for hospital workers in Bristol, UK. We touched on numerous topics, including global supply chains, the abstraction of hospital labor into monetary concerns, engineer and scientists subjectivities, worker organizing, medical device design paradigms, speculation about communism, and more.

As health workers we do all kinds of jobs and many of us don’t know what the other one is actually doing. This is a problem in at least two senses. Firstly, our struggles for better conditions for ourselves and our patients often remain divided into professional groups, trusts or departments. We therefore feature reports about health workers talking about their work, e.g. these reports by an NHS IT worker or by a clinical research nurse. Secondly, in the current system industries are structured in the interest of those in power and according to the rules of markets and money relations. That turns them into often fragmented and hierarchical systems that are not very conducive for a free and effective cooperation of everyone involved. As health workers, we therefore have to start understanding how our industry actually works in order to be able to take it over and run it in the interest of everyone in the future. We have to understand various aspects, from the supply of material, to research and production of pharmaceuticals or medical machinery, to the wider management of hospitals and services. For that purpose we spoke to a friend who works in medical device engineering.

The rest of the interview can be read here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *