Electromedicine Intern

The work

GEE provides electromedical engineering services — maintenance, repair and compliance for hospital equipment — deployed on-site inside Spanish hospitals. Mine was Gregorio Marañón, one of Madrid’s largest teaching hospitals.

Diagnosed, repaired and maintained life-critical systems: ventilators and respirators, anaesthesia machines, dialysis units, electrosurgical units, ultrasound scanners, EEG caps, neonatal incubators and defibrillators.

That involved soldering and component-level repair, and deconstructing and reassembling devices to verify reliability and safety. It was hands-on rework, not supervised observation — which is the part that changed how I think about hardware.

Alongside the repairs I applied electromechanical safety standards and compliance procedures, wrote technical reports documenting faults and interventions, and built preventive-maintenance plans rather than only reacting to failures. I also observed and analysed Da Vinci surgical robotics, which is where the reliability question stops being abstract: a platform that integrates that many subsystems has a failure surface to match.

What it taught me

Working where a mistake reaches a patient is a different discipline from working where a mistake costs you an afternoon.

Two things follow from that, and they have stayed with me into research. The first is that documentation is part of the repair, not paperwork afterwards — an undocumented fix is a fault waiting to recur with no history attached. The second is that preventive maintenance is a data problem before it is a mechanical one: you cannot schedule against failures you have not recorded.

It is also the reason I am comfortable saying a measurement is unreliable. In a hospital, the alternative to admitting uncertainty is not confidence — it is risk transferred to someone who cannot see it.