Planning of maintenance for medical devices through a workload redistribution in a clinical engineering service

Abstract

The common practice of Clinical Engineering Services (CESs) is to manage separately Electric Safety Checks (ESCs), Quality Controls (QCs) and Preventive Maintenance (PM). However, protocols related to these activities are partially overlapped. This results in a redundancy of maintenance steps producing a waste of time. Furthermore, outsourced CESs are in charge of managing activities in hospitals located in different areas with the same team. Thus the distance to be covered by technicians from an area to another one in order to reach the equipment represents a waste of time. This problem can be solved by merging ESC, QC and PM into a unique operative protocol we call Single Planned Activity (SPA). This implies the development of new maintenance plans and the human resources redistribution, and clinical engineers are in charge of this task. In order to assess its feasibility, we developed a comprehensive method that consists of the analysis of technician’s workload and of the algorithm able to generate a monthly maintenance plan. The method reprograms the previous planned activities through the available human resources redistribution in a more efficient way, according to their actual workload. The method has been tested in an Italian CES and proved to be useful for clinical engineers.