









































1 J Global Clinical Engineering Vol.4 Issue 1, 2021

Editor’s  Corner
CE Vision 2022 – Year of the Child

Greetings, fellow CEs around the globe. First, I commend 
and thank each of you for the hard work and enormous 
contributions you’ve made to saving lives and conquering 
this vicious pandemic. It has been – and continues to be 
– a rewarding and humbling opportunity to work with 
you this past year to solve the endless waves of HTA and 
HTM challenges. WORTHY WORK! This is why we chose 
the CE profession, isn’t it?

I would like to share a fresh idea of renewal for us to 
consider and embrace: creating a “CE Vision 2022 - Year 
of the Child” action plan. The global COVID-19 pandemic 
spanning 2020 and 2021 has been terribly hard on chil-
dren. While the Coronavirus hasn’t claimed many young 
lives directly, birth rates have plunged around the world, 
children have suffered from loss of parents, grandparents, 
immense social and school isolation, daily fear, and un-
employed parents everywhere have been hard pressed to 
provide basic food and healthcare for their kids.

Children are our future, our hope, our path to enduring 
survival! During this pandemic, though, children and their 
very childhood have been threatened worldwide like no 
time in recent history. 

What can WE do? I think we can focus some of our 
collective time and energy to improve health and welfare 
for children a bit at a time in the coming years. How? Well, 
we might start with ideas and actions that support our 
CE colleagues in Children’s Hospitals, and also supporting 
pediatricians, family physicians, and midwives, who do 
the lion’s share of medical for children around the world.

A little background: my career begin in 1975 at ECRI, 
and my first field assignments that year were at Phila-
delphia’s Children’s Hospital, testing and servicing the 
equipment in the Neonatal Intensive Care and Pediatric 
Intensive Care Units. Those weeks of time working with 
nurses, physicians, and fellow engineers left an indelible 
image in my mind’s eye: the primal struggle of a tiny life 

clinging to each breath and heartbeat. Over the decades, 
in the course of various educational and humanitarian 
relief efforts I have had the privilege of visiting NICU 
and PICU units throughout the US, and in China, India, 
Mongolia, Romania, Slovakia, and elsewhere. Every visit 
brings back the intense reminder of why I am a Clinical 
Engineer: to save lives and improve the human condition 
whenever, wherever, and however I can.

Back in the mid-90s, I had the exciting opportunity to 
hear Dr. Jonas Salk deliver the opening keynote speech at 
“Child Health 2000: 2nd World Congress and Exposition” 
in Vancouver, Canada from May 30-June 3, 1995. Dr Salk 
died barely a month later, and this, his final public speech, 
was a clarion call: let us all do everything we can to assure 
safe and healthy kids by the year 2000! 

On behalf of ACCE, I led a panel with Bob Morris titled 
Global Approach to Appropriate Technology for Maternal 
and Child Health on Technology Assessment and man-
agement at the Congress, which you can still read in two 
archived ACCE newsletters.1,2,3  I must admit that I left 
that conference quite humbled, however. I came to under-
stand that child and mother mortality depended on far 
more simple things than ventilators and monitors. I was 
struck by the simplest of ideas presented. For example, 
one product was a small cereal-box sized kit with a bar 
of soap, a plastic drape, a clean razor blade, and a length 
of twine. i.e., a simple baby delivery kit to keep the mom 
and baby off and dirt floor and provide a modicum of 
sanitation for mother and child! 

During the following decades, during my travels to many 
bare-bones hospitals and clinics I repeatedly humbled 
by the heroic efforts to care for children with woefully 
inadequate resources. Two examples that stick in my 
mind were 1) seeing three preemies tucked in a broken 
incubator with the doors wide open to compensate for 
the failed thermostat, and the oxygen plumbed in through 
plastic tubing from a welding oxygen tank 40 feet away, 

http://www.globalce.org
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J Global Clinical Engineering Vol.4 Issue 1, 2021  2

and 2) a heartbreaking discussion with a post-surgical 
pediatric recovery team which was experiencing nearly 
100% mortality despite their best efforts. 

Only a few years later, in 2003, my own premature 
daughter’s life was saved by a new medical gas, nitric oxide, 
that my team had the privilege of introducing to the US 
in the late 90s. It was only a mere stroke of luck that the 
hospital had just introduced that technology, or she may 
not have survived. These many child health technology 
challenges – and opportunities – have persisted can be 
found in every corner of the world, as documented by 
our colleagues like Tom Judd in 2016 in collaboration 
with WHO.3

It is now 26 years since that 2nd Child Health 2000 
Congress in Vancouver, and, yes, we have cell phones and 
apps, and we have access to many training and research 
resources, but the child and maternal mortality rates are 
still unacceptably high, even in the US. 

As I mentioned at the beginning, we cannot ignore 
the horrors that this COVID-19 pandemic is creating for 
newborns and children around the globe. The second Coro-
navirus surge in India this spring, for example, will leave a 
huge number of babies and children without one or both 
of their parents, and the national hospital resources are 
terribly depleted. This is presenting yet another terrible 
child health crisis that cannot be overlooked.

I have written this editorial to suggest that we, the 
Global Clinical Engineering community lean in and lock 
our shoulders together through GCEA, IFMBE CED, the 
Healthcare Technology Foundation, and our vast network 
of global colleagues, friends, and partners like WHO, 
PAHO, UNICEF, and many others to improve Child Health 
beginning in 2022 and beyond. 

How? Following our upcoming ICEHTMC global con-
gress in Orlando, let’s begin holding a monthly “Global 
Clinical Engineering Year of the Child” collaboration 
meeting on the first Tuesday of every month with Zoom, 
during which we can set global and regional priorities. 
Let’s set up a dedicated CE Child Health WhatsApp group 
to communicate and collaborate, too! 

Sanitation and education could be a humble start, 
but we can do more. Perhaps we can create a global CE 
resource for children’s hospitals, nurses, physicians, and 
midwives to access training literature. Perhaps we can 
work with WHO, UNICEF, and others to tackle essential 
product and training resources that match language and 
cultural norms. Perhaps we can invent a creative supply 
chain to source donations, parts, or equipment. Perhaps 
we can become a CE resource for the many government 
and faith-based relief agencies who work to save children’s 
lives each and every day. Perhaps, too, we can make a 
point of inviting one article on Child Health for this Global 
Clinical Engineering Journal? And why not make this a 
resounding theme of our upcoming ICEHTMC Conference 
in Orlando in September, too?

Let’s stand up and be counted as a Clinical Engineering 
community, proclaiming to the public that we can and will 
make a difference in Child Health. Let us commit to each 
other to ensure that our Clinical Engineering profession 
makes meaningful improvements to Child Health by 
carving out a piece of our time and energy every month 
in order to make a difference together. 

It is not impossible! As the old adage tells us: “A journey 
of a thousand li begins with a single step.”

REFERENCES

1. Grant, JP. A Critical Decade in the Crusade for Children. 
ACCE Newsletter May 1995:11-13. https://accenet.
org/publications/Newsletters/ACCENewsMay1995.
pdf Last accessed 25 April 2021.

2. Sloane, EB. ACCE Newsletter Jan 1996:18-19. https://
accenet.org/publications/Newsletters/ACCENewsJan-
Feb1996.pdf  Last accessed 25 April 2021.

3. Jacobs, LD, Judd, TM, and Bhutta, ZA. Addressing the 
Child and Maternal Mortality Crisis in Haiti through 
a Central Referral Hospital Providing Countrywide 
Care. The Permanente Journal Spring 2016:50-70. 
http://www.thepermanentejournal.org/issues/2016/
spring/6061-crisis-in-haiti.html Last accessed 25 
April 2021.

Elliot B. Sloane, PhD, CCE

Copyright © 2021. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY): Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International - CC 
BY 4.0. The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in 
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http://www.globalce.org
http://www.globalce.org
https://accenet.org/publications/Newsletters/ACCENewsMay1995.pdf
https://accenet.org/publications/Newsletters/ACCENewsMay1995.pdf
https://accenet.org/publications/Newsletters/ACCENewsMay1995.pdf
https://accenet.org/publications/Newsletters/ACCENewsJanFeb1996.pdf
https://accenet.org/publications/Newsletters/ACCENewsJanFeb1996.pdf
https://accenet.org/publications/Newsletters/ACCENewsJanFeb1996.pdf
http://www.thepermanentejournal.org/issues/2016/spring/6061-crisis-in-haiti.html
http://www.thepermanentejournal.org/issues/2016/spring/6061-crisis-in-haiti.html

