We have seen well-chosen, well-funded and properly authorised projects stall for a reason that never appears in any proposal: nobody had decided where the thing lived.
The equipment arrives, gets used enthusiastically for two weeks, and then enters a predictable cycle — it runs out of battery, someone puts it away "for safety" in a place only they know, the next shift cannot find it, and within a month it is in a drawer. There was no decision to abandon it. There was an absence of small decisions.
Worth making them before delivery. There are five.
1. Where it charges
It sounds trivial and is not. The real question is not "is there a socket?", it is who plugs it in.
Shared equipment with nobody responsible for putting it on charge at the end of the day is always at 40% when it is needed. Institutions that solve this always do the same thing: charging becomes part of the end-of-shift routine, like any other check, and does not depend on someone remembering.
On our side, each unit's battery is visible in the fleet from the browser, which turns "I think it was charged" into a percentage you can see before walking over to fetch it.
2. Where it sleeps, and who holds the key
A locked cupboard is the minimum, but the problem is rarely theft — it is availability. Equipment locked in an office that closes at 5pm does not exist for the night shift.
The balance that tends to work: locked storage that is accessible to every shift that will use it, not to the person who bought it. Worth writing down who has access rather than letting it emerge.
Preventing misuse does not have to be solved with the lock: the headset can be PIN-locked, so that outside a session run by the team it is not usable as a consumer device. That separates two questions that usually get stuck together — physical access and use.
3. Who moves it between departments
This is where nearly all inter-department sharing fails.
If two departments share the equipment and nobody defined who moves it, it stays wherever it is. In practice only two models work:
- a fixed home. The equipment belongs to one department and the others come to fetch it, with a simple record of who took it;
- a trolley with an owner. The equipment travels, but a person or role is responsible for knowing where it is.
What does not work is symmetric sharing with no owner. It is not a goodwill problem — responsibility divided between two departments is nobody's responsibility.
4. Hygiene between patients
This one is usually thought through, because infection control asks. So just the link to the procedure, and one logistical note: the cleaning materials must be where the equipment is, not at the other end of the corridor. A hygiene routine that requires a walk is a routine that decays.
5. Weekends, holidays and the person who leaves
The honest test of a project: does it work in the week the person who brought it in is on holiday?
If the answer is no, there is no project yet — there is an enthusiast. The fix is boring and effective: two trained people per shift instead of one, and the procedure written where the equipment is, not in an email from August.
What the system solves, and what it does not
It solves: seeing each unit's battery and state from the browser without walking over; locking use outside a session; running the session from a PC or tablet on the same network, which means whoever is driving does not need the headset in their hands. That, plus the log of every session, which also answers "was it used?" without relying on memory.
It does not solve: none of this invents a place. It does not decide whose key it is, does not carry the equipment between floors and does not put anyone on charging duty. A supplier telling you the platform handles logistics is selling you something that does not exist — logistics is an institutional decision, and it is a ten-minute decision if taken before delivery instead of three months after.
The ten-minute list
Before the equipment arrives, write down answers to these five:
- Which room does it live in, and which cupboard?
- Who has access, on each shift?
- Who puts it on charge at the end of the day, by role and not by name?
- If shared, does it have a fixed home or an owner?
- Where are the hygiene materials?
Five lines taped to the cupboard door are worth more than any section of the specification.
In short
- Equipment without an address ends up in a drawer, and never by decision.
- Charging belongs in the end-of-shift routine, not in good memory.
- Sharing without an owner does not work — fixed home or trolley with an owner.
- If it fails during one person's holiday, it is an enthusiast, not a project.