Specifying Compressed air for healthcare

Safety first
The highest priority for medical air and its use in hospitals
is the safety of the patient. This means that breathing air
needs to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
At the core of this reliability is redundancy. The 93/42/
EEC and related regulation stipulates that there needs to
be multiple sources of compressed air to ensure that if
one compressor is under maintenance and a second fails
at the same time then there is a back-up of one or more
sources that is able to provide 100 per cent of a hospitals
maximum air requirements. Therefore, it is common practice
for installations to have triple or even quadruple systems in
place, with each compressor able to feed 100 per cent of
the demand.

Medical gas in use
There are numerous uses for medical gas within the health services, all covered by the Medical Devices Directive 93/42/EC

Artificial respiration: Only a highly reliable source of absolutely pure breathing air is suitable for supplying to patients. In BOGE treatment units
the compressed air is dried, purified and treated in seven stages to obtain medical compressed air that complies with DIN EN ISO 7396-1.

Medical systems: Medical compressed air is subject to the European Pharmacopoeia, which defines stringent purity requirements for the air. To
ensure this purity, sterile filters provide an eighth treatment stage to all medical air whatever its final use is, for artificial respiration of patients or
for delivering air to anaesthetic systems.

Medical staff: Whether for use by patients or in operating theatres, medical compressed air must be readily available at all times. By designing
its compressed air generation systems with at least triple redundancy, BOGE virtually rule out the risk of failure.

Surgical instruments: Numerous surgical instruments and tools operate with compressed air. In addition, medical devices need to be inspected
or dried at repeated intervals, all this utilises medical
compressed air