The spare-parts myth — and the real fight for the right to repair

"We can't fix it — there are no parts." Every biomedical professional has heard it, said it, or both. But how often is it literally true?

Research from Duke University's developing-world healthcare technology group, published in Expert Review of Medical Devices, examined large samples of out-of-service equipment in LMIC hospitals and reached a striking conclusion: only a small minority of broken devices — on the order of one in eight — required a spare part that genuinely could not be sourced or fabricated locally. The more common barriers were missing service manuals, missing training, and missing systems for managing the work.

That finding should change how we allocate generosity. Shipping containers of parts helps; sharing service documentation, schematics, and troubleshooting knowledge often helps more — and it ships at the speed of an email.

It also explains why the right-to-repair conversation has reached medicine. As The Lancet argued in an editorial aptly titled 'The medical right to repair: the right to save lives,' restrictions that keep hospitals from accessing service information, diagnostic software, and parts hit hardest in exactly the places that can least afford manufacturer service contracts.

We don't approach this as a fight with manufacturers — many support global health work admirably, and quality and safety concerns around repair are real and deserve respect. But we do believe, plainly, that a hospital that owns a device should be able to keep it alive, and that the knowledge to do so safely should flow as freely as the goodwill does.

In the meantime, the network's answer is practical: collect and share documentation legally and generously, teach repair fundamentals that transfer across models, and connect technicians to specialists who can talk them through the fix. Most 'no parts' problems are really 'no information' problems — and information is the one resource we can give away without running out.