Background The number and diversity of medical devices held and managed by a teaching hospital’s pharmacy is very large. Therefore a good practical classification and the availability for all users of an actual guide is a good way to ensure better management and avoid mistakes.

Purpose In this work, we aimed to establish a practical and useful classification of the medical devices managed by our hospital pharmacy and to create an electronic guide containing the necessary information.

Material and methods An exhaustive list of all the medical devices used in our teaching hospital was collected from the pharmacy management software and extracted as an EXCEL file containing 233 items. Then, a practical classification was made, based mainly on anatomical systems, and all the medical devices were classified into categories according to their main anatomical place of use. Hospital pharmacists contributed to this process. The percentage of items in each class was determined. The final step was to create a guide of all the medical devices in the form of monographs containing all the relevant information for the users.

Results The classification established contained nine classes. The main classes determined were: medical devices for respiratory system (23.37% of the items), surgical devices (18.77%), parenteral devices (12.64%) and ophtalmological devices (10.34%). This classification, used to establish a logical system of storage, allowed the optimisation of the management of space and time, and would avoid some mistakes or confusion. A guide to all the medical devices in the form of monographs containing a picture of every product, the names and synonyms, the definitions, indications and all other relevant information was created. An electronic version, periodically actualised of this guide, is to be included in the hospital’s information system and to be accessible to all users.

Conclusion Classification and nomenclature systems are usually developed for specific purposes, such as Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification by the World Health Organisation for drugs. Medical devices are more difficult to group into categories. In this work we established a logical classification based on the main anatomical places of use. This classification permitted better storage and management of these products.

No conflict of interest