Inspections and Records
As a second step, a hospital might establish a rigorous preventive maintenance timetable for workers to follow in inspecting and maintaining every piece of equipment in every room. Workers would be required to document their maintenance routines, thereby providing maintenance supervisors and the hospital with an accurate history of maintenance and repairs for every piece of equipment.
As preventive maintenance records are improved, the hospital can better analyze equipment performance, for example, by comparing frequency of equipment malfunctions and repairs before and after the preventive maintenance schedule is established. Over time, the hospital can more closely track equipment life cycles and prepare more accurate equipment-replacement forecasts and budgets. Furthermore, a hospital is able to spend more time on preventive efforts, and less time on repairs. For example, its maintenance/repair ratio might be 15 hours of preventive maintenance for every hour of repairs; in the past, the ratio may have been just the opposite.
Once a schedule is established, maintenance workers may spend more time inspecting and maintaining equipment that was not properly maintained in the past. A thorough maintenance schedule that includes every piece of equipment in a facility has the potential to stress the capacity of the typical maintenance staff. Ideally, a hospital would be able to increase the staff to fill its need, but this is not often possible. A triage system — the same kind that works in the emergency room — can be implemented for equipment.
Equipment that supports operating and emergency rooms would likely have a higher priority than equipment that supports other areas, such as lobbies or meeting rooms. The goal of a carefully-planned schedule, however, is that a minimum level of maintenance would be required — and provided — for all equipment.
And because a well-prioritized preventive maintenance schedule can save so much in time and money, a facility may actually be able to hire some additional workers. For example, 16 more workers may be needed to establish a schedule that maximizes the performance and life cycle of all of a hospital’s equipment, but eight workers may be sufficient to maintain the most important equipment.
Overall, the hospital is still able to improve equipment performance and increase equipment life cycles. It’s not a perfect solution, but it does reflect the realities of cost control pressures and budget constraints.
