There are too few nurses to afford old-fashioned tools
The shortage of nurses and their heavy workload drive us to look for ways to leave them more time for patient care. One solution is medical furniture that better organises tools and medicines.
A nurse’s job requires impeccable order and accuracy even in critical situations. Conventional kitchen-style cabinets and shelves are not practical in a nurse’s work. The Estonian furniture manufacturer Merianto noticed the problem and launched the medical furniture series Merianto Medical, which meets the needs of health care workers.
According to Raimo Grichin, Managing Director at Merianto, the inspiration to produce special medical furniture came already ten years ago. “When I listened to representatives of large hospitals in Finland, I understood that we should develop our own solutions for medical furniture, based on the universal ISO modular system. Our customers know everything about treating and taking care of patients, but when choosing furniture, they want to choose from fully developed solutions that consider the specifics of health care and efficiently support their work,” he says.
Medical cabinets can be assembled from modules according to the needs of the particular procedural room or operating theatre. The special solution saves up to 60% space. Shelves and drawers can easily be removed from the cabinet. No ladder is needed to access the contents of the upper drawers in tall cabinets. Merianto Medical’s solution makes it easy to monitor the stock levels and shelf lives of medicines.
A well-designed solution
At the heart of Merianto Medical furniture is the ISO modular system, which is used to build a comprehensive logistical solution for hospital cabinets, where each item is in its proper place and can be found quickly and conveniently. This reduces the time spent searching for medicines and supplies, and also speeds up the onboarding of new employees.
Furniture by Merianto Medical was installed at the workplace of Krista Mustkivi, Head of Nursing at Tallinn Children’s Hospital Paediatrics Clinic, at the end of last year, and she says it’s extremely convenient. “Since we use many supplies of different sizes, it’s great that the size of the compartments can be easily adjusted. In this way, we can organise everything and quickly find the items we need,” says Mustkivi.
“The system helps you get a quick overview of the medicines, and stock-taking is much quicker,” says Andrus Loit, Export Manager at Merianto. He recalls the feedback he received from the head nurse of a leading Tallinn hospital, who said that with the new cabinet solution, she saved six hours a month on receiving medicines, placing them in the cabinet and taking stock.
According to Krista Mustkivi, the supplies are now much better organised. “In the past, there were few aids in our department, but since the profile of the patients and the treatment methods have changed, we needed a new storage system. Of course, the new solution took
a little time to get used to, but by now everything has found a place and the packages are also cleaner, because there is no longer a need to rummage through them while searching,” explains the paediatrics nurse manager.
Work is smoother with the new tool
Annaliisa Kruutmann, Head of Midwifery at the Pre-delivery Department of the East Tallinn Central Hospital, highly praises the tailor-made furniture. “The cabinets are made exactly as we wanted – the doors are transparent, the size of the drawers corresponds to the size of our supplies, and the cabinets can be locked if necessary,” she says, pointing out some of the advantages of the solution. Kruutmann’s colleagues from the department also praise the cabinets for their accessibility and say that they help us respond efficiently in urgent situations.
The Merianto Medical team has developed its medical furniture according to customer feedback and has continued to find new solutions that contribute to efficiency and time-saving for the users.