Making Health Care Equipment Ideas for Local Design and Production

About this book

A huge need for affordable health-care equipment exists in developing countries. Locally produced equipment is cheaper and more easily maintained than imported items, and can be designed to suit the community's needs and resources. This book contains illustrated step-by-step instructions for making items such as folding beds, ward screens, wheelchairs and mobility aids, and gives guidelines for adapting these designs to particular circumstances. Ideas and designs are included for hospital furniture, tricycles, wheelchairs and carts, physiotherapy and orthopaedics, laboratories and maternity and child care. There is also information about basic construction and marketing methods, and a list of resources from which further information may be obtained.

Contents

Part 1 Basic construction hints: basic "A" frame; low-cost wheels; tricks with bicycle parts; cushions. Part 2 Designs for hospital furniture: folding hospital beds; ward screen; blood transfusion drip stand; bedside table and locker; hospital wheelchairs; patients' trolleys; "A" frame trolleys. Part 3 Tricycles, wheelchairs and carts: front-wheel-drive tricycles; rear-wheel-drive tricycles; the ATI-Hotchkiss wheelchair. Part 4 Physiotherapy and orthopaedic equipment: parallel bars; walking frames; thermoplastic aids; supine exercising machine; calipers; jaipur limb. Part 5 Laboratory equipment: haematocrit centrifuge; constant temperature water bath; hospital water still. Part 6 Maternity and infant care equipment: baby resuscitation tables; phototherapy box for neonatal jaundice; premature baby incubator; suction pump for newborn infants; squatting chair for delivery. Part 7 Making a business of it. Part 8 Resources.

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