My personal experience...
until recently our hospital had 25 beds dedicated to long term bed ridden patients(ALS etc), all requiring assisted breathing for at least 12hours a day.
The ONLY time that the bed was made available to us was when the unfortunate soul passed away and should this happen during the week end I can guarantee that Monday morning a new patient was occupying the bed.
As the beds were new we had almost no repairs in this two year period and even in those two cases having access to beds was anything but simple.
So needless to say our PM schedules were not met, but fortunately (for us) we had our work orders signed off by the dept. head, with onus on them to call us asap when the bed was eventually available.
In all honesty (hand on heart) the majority of the PM's were carried out when the department was transferred to another hospital in our group and the beds repurposed in other departments.
