Protecting the immunocompromised patient: the role of the hospital clinical engineer.

While the discipline of clinical engineering has long been limited to the area of medical equipment management, few areas in hospital engineering practice so closely meet the literal definition of "clinical" engineering as the care of the immunocompromised patient. Although ventilation has been the domain of the plant maintenance department, the increasing numbers of clinical engineers being given responsibility for plant functions, as well as the critical nature of the topic, make the care of the bone marrow transplant (BMT) patient an appropriate area of clinical engineering practice. Further, as clinical engineering branches out of the equipment management area, the clinical engineer can be truly termed the "hospital engineer".