[News] RECALL THREAD-- IMPORTANT PHILIPS DREAMSTATION & SYSTEM ONE USERS

[Gideon]

Whichever you can get first.

[Deborah K.]

That's what I thought.  You and Sarcastic Dave have confirmed it.   to both of you!

[cbeissel]

Here in Australia I have just received my “Urgent Product Defect Correction” letter from Philips.

It asked me to fill in another (paper) form.

I am still unclear what the next steps are. 

[cbeissel]

I managed to get through to Philips on the phone!

Apparently my next step is to keep waiting.

[Dafod]

Philips does have their website registration active now for Australia, so no need for paper etc.

https://www.philips.com.au/healthcare/e/...src-update

[cbeissel]

I had already registered on the website.

The paper form I had to return is for Philips to demonstrate to the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Authority) that they have contacted me.

[Rice95]

Yep Gideon you're right. Supply/Demand 101. 

The day after the recall I had an Airsense 10 Autoset on my doorstep. I knew there was going to be a rush for ResMed machines....and I got a brand new factory sealed machine for 200.00 less than what they are selling them now. Of course after a global recall there's going to be a price hike and a shortage----I'm glad I had the sense to nab it while I could, upgrade the treatment, and save a few dollars as well.

[sleeprn]

Must we always assume the worst? Actually patients are being "compliant" if the DO stop using their machines. This isn't a situation that was foreseen and written into the rule books.  Let's recall that there are good people working in health care and, yes, even in the health care industry. They aren't out just looking for ways to screw patients over.

That said, it's shameful that you haven't been alerted by your dme.

I'm really not an apologist for Phillips, but...they will need to contact, what, half a million people? and they don't have all those records by any means. Most don't buy their machines directly from Phillips. How would they have one's email or phone number?

The DMEs know who has these machines and could notify people more easily. What about pushing out a notice via the app? If they can access and accumulate my data through the app, they can push out a message to me to tell me my machine has been recalled. We are now going on one month since the official recall and many people have not received any notice and only know about it either through discussion boards or watching the evening news. I had a recall on a car in order to get a nonessential software update and was notified by postcard within two weeks of the recall. How many Subarus are on the road? And they got a postcard to those folks. 

I would add that this also emphasizes problems with the whole compliance issue. What other piece of medical equipment is taken away from folks if they don’t use it? We will give people expensive nerve stimulators to keep forever knowing they will only need them for a couple of weeks until they get to surgery. No one checks compliance. I have some knee braces for arthritis that cost more than a CPAP machine. No one has ever checked to see if I actually use them. But that’s off topic here. 

I don’t think anyone’s condemning all of healthcare, but there is a lot that is wrong with this scenario.

[Robert121571]

I called Medicare to see if they would pay early and they could not give me a strait answer.

[Glen e]

From above:

“I knew there was going to be a rush for ResMed machines”

And that’s exactly what occurred to me and my brother. I had a resmed machine, as I’ve said above, and he had a dreamstation. The day that we heard about this and read this thread, he got on the phone and made calls to all the people that everybody else here has called, and got nowhere. We both looked at each other and knew instantly with the amount of people out there looking for a replacement, and the finite amount of machines that were on the shelf from anybody besides philips, We “did the math“ and immediately got online and grabbed a machine.

Because the alternative, like so many above have found,  is Medicare may say this and DME’s  it may say that, but there’s no amount of money worth not being able to sleep. He paid a bit more, but is sleeping fine these days in. Sometimes you can’t wait for the bureaucracy to get this straightened out, because in this case,  no amount of calling 60 minutes or getting your local media people riled up against  some multinational corporation is gonna get you sleep relief.