Here at Georgian Anesthesia and Medical Corp., we understand that your anesthesia equipment is a key part of your veterinary practice. Because of this, it’s important to maintain that equipment to the best of your ability in order to ensure that it continues to work properly, delivering the right amounts of anesthetics and oxygen to your animal patients. Our team wants to help you keep your equipment in peak operating condition so that you can always rely on it, so in this article, we’ll be going over three tips for veterinary anesthesia equipment maintenance.
One of the main procedures for proper veterinary anesthesia equipment maintenance is verifying the circuits. To do this, connect the circuit in question to the fresh gas outlet, close the patient’s circuit outlet with a plug (or block it with your thumb), and open the flowmeter to about 200 ml. Next, close the gas evacuation valve and press the oxygen flush button until the manometer indicates about 30 cm H2O. Check the manometer to make sure that the pressure does not decrease, then open the evacuation valve before using the anesthesia machine again.
In addition to the above veterinary anesthesia equipment maintenance procedure, we at Georgian Anesthesia and Medical Corp. recommend that you regularly replace the soda lime. A simple rule to follow is to replace the lime once the absorber has been used for 14 hours–we suggest using a tag to record the date of the last replacement in order to accurately track this information. Lastly, we recommend that you call a professional technician to provide expert veterinary anesthesia equipment maintenance services once a year.