Cory Doctorow’s latest piece for the Electronic Frontier Foundation touches on many of the community-led projects to address the shortages of medical equipment we’re seeing around the world and is an interesting reflection on how the Right to Repair factors into these efforts.
Making the comparison to farmers in the USA who are at the heart of the US Right to Repair Movement, he argues that doctors and other front-line medical professionals are now facing the kinds of frustrations at the heart of Right to Repair concerns:
The very nature of emergency medicine means that front-line professionals must make decisions about how to keep their equipment running when it is not fully functional. Even under normal circumstances, there aren’t always timely, reliable sources of parts and skilled service. The right person to decide whether a field repair should be attempted, and whether the repair is solid enough to rely upon are medical professionals, not the shareholders of med-tech companies or the lawyers who write their terms of service and patent applications.
An interesting read: