Hi Jason. The new AS-3551 will be the subject of a half day workshop at the annual SMBE conference in Mudgee from 24 to 27 March. See www.smbensw.org.au for details. The workshop will be facilitated by Mr Mike Flood who is one of the authors of the standard. The College of Biomedical Engineering will be putting on a one day AS-3551 seminar in capital cities around Australia later in the year. I hope this helps. Bruce.
Sent from my HTC ----- Reply message ----- From: "Jason Chung" <jason...@hotmail.com> To: <bmelist@bme.asn.au> Subject: [bmelist] AS3551 Date: Fri, Jan 25, 2013 3:29 pm Hi all, The new AS/NZ 3551 has been out for a few months, and I would like to hear from the biomed community on the interpretation and the implementation approach. There are numerous inconsistencies, but the two main points that I would like to raise here are: B11.6, Notes (2) - "Most Class 1 electrical equipment has accessible metal parts that are protectively earthed, in which case the maximum earth leakage current will be dictated by the allowable value for touch current with the protective earth conductor open, and not by the limit stated above" Given that most, if not all, Class 1 equipment has metal parts, the allowable values of earth leakage current are therefore redundant. All Class 1 equipment will be dictated to comply with earth leakage current same as touch current of 100μA (no fault) and 500μA (single-fault). This is near impossible to achieve even for stand-alone equipment, not considering any medical electrical system yet. With protective earth open, measuring touch current is effectively measuring any current that will flow into the protective earth, if it is intact. 7.3.3 - "When ICT equipment is integral to, communicate with, and/or controls medical equipment or a medical electrical system......testing protocols......equally applicable to networked systems. The interpretation of 'integral to, communicate with' means that all network hubs, routers, wireless access points, electronic medical record server, and everything in a IT server room will be applicable. Given that most hospitals operate a complex medical network that are indirectly part of the overall hospital network, the interconnections and information transfer means that all hospital ICT equipments are covered within this standard? Thanks. Regards, Jason Chung PeterMac, Melbourne