Over the years in-house biomed work has become more and more one of routine. Preventive Maintenance (PM) routines have become well-established, whilst opportunities to tackle interesting repairs can now be few and far between (or, just as likely, deemed to be "not cost-effective").
Once the PM schedule has been organized we may find that it requires hundreds of man-hours of work each year. But how should we allocate those (generally repetitive) tasks?
One way is to assign each technician to specific types or groups of equipment. Anaesthesia equipment, or laboratory equipment, electrosurgical units, or x-ray equipment etc. The same technician would also most likely be the one to respond to calls to repair equipment within the group. We can call this tech the "lead" (as in leader) technician.
The downside of such an approach is that others within the team may begin to feel left out, especially if left to deal with (what to them may be) less interesting equipment. One way around this is to split up the equipment groups, so that more than one tech (or even all of them) gets a chance to be involved with each type of equipment.
Once a PM system has become well established, another problem can be that technicians can become dispirited (worn down, or simply bored) by an endless trail of PM, especially where large quantities of equipment of the same type are being dealt with. Unimaginative PM procedures (sometimes little more than pressing buttons on an Electrical Safety Tester) won't (and don't) help.
How should we maintain the morale of the in-house biomed team? In a word:- involvement. As well as rotating equipment responsibilities (aka, sharing the burden) within the team.
I would suggest something along the lines of:-
1) Assigning a named tech as the lead for each equipment
2) Assigning a named tech to oversee each user department
3) Rotating techs through equipment and departments over time
4) Making lead techs accountable for PM completion targets
5) Making techs answerable for feedback received from "their" users
6) Sharing (or doubling-up) on PM visits from time-to-time
7) Continuous re-evaluation (revision) of PM procedures
8) Adopting Risk-Based PM (usually leading to longer intervals)
9) Promoting "walk-through" inspections of user departments
The last mentioned being good for PR, as well as nipping problems in the bud.
There again, we could always ask for volunteers!
Does anyone have any thoughts and experiences about this that they would like to share?
But another thought occurs:- is the "trade" as interesting (varied, challenging, rewarding ... or what-have-you) as it once was? Is it still attractive to the "hands-on, fix-it" type of young person (assuming that they still abound)? And ... would us old-timers still want to get involved today if we had our time again?
