STAT! Five Reasons For Maintaining Medical Equipment
Medical equipment is all that stands between you and losing a patient. Your equipment has to be ready to use at a heartbeat's notice. You do not have time to find a duplicate piece of equipment when a patient is bleeding out on your emergency room floor. That said, here are five quick reasons your hospital's needs medical equipment maintenance.
Save Precious Life-Saving Seconds
When a patient enters the emergency room and has suffered major injuries, a heart attack, or stroke, you and your doctors and nurses have only a few minutes to stop bleeding, restore normal breathing, insert an IV to keep the patient from going into shock (if the patient is not in shock already), connect the patient to a heart monitor and a pulse machine, and administer medication to reduce pain, inflammation, and infection. All of these steps, and more, have to occur in under five minutes to stabilize the patient for further treatment and/or surgery. When you have a medical machine fail on the spot, at least one nurse in that room has to stop and quickly find another machine that works. Those life-saving seconds are too precious to waste over equipment that should be running just fine.
Prevent the Transmission of Disease
Equipment, such as IV drip machines, dialysis machines, and blood and plasma collection machines, all come into contact with patients who carry, or may be carrying, serious diseases. Sterilization of this equipment is just one of the many services provided during routine maintenance. Additionally, the internal workings and pumps of these machines need to be cleaned, sterilized, and repaired so that they will continue to do what is expected of them.
Replace Worn Parts to Keep the Machines Going
Medical equipment is definitely NOT cheap. It costs your hospital a small fortune every time you have to replace beds, IV pumps, heart monitors, etc.. It is far cheaper and more cost-efficient to maintain the machines you have and swap out worn parts to keep the machines going rather than completely replacing them.
Most hospital equipment continues to work for years before it becomes obsolete. Once the equipment is absolutely obsolete, it still gains new life in nursing colleges, but only if the equipment is still safe to use. It only takes a few hours each month to check the equipment and make any necessary repairs.
Keep Your Hospital Staff Safe
Medical equipment is mostly electrical. Faults in the electrical systems of equipment put your hospital staff at risk for injuries and even electrocution. If there are shorts in a cord or exposed wires, it only takes one nurse or doctor to stand in a pool of liquid and touch those wires to get electrocuted. When your equipment is well maintained, such a dangerous piece of equipment is removed from operating rooms and emergency rooms to prevent accidental injuries and fatalities to your staff.
Your Patients Should Never Be Statistics
The FDA receives hundreds of thousands of reports each year of faulty medical equipment that causes people to die rather than saving their lives. That is a staggering number of patients who become statistics in these reports. Your patients should never become stats in faulty medical equipment reports when you have the power to prevent that from happening. If you hired a company to properly maintain all of your medical equipment, you would discover the machines that are about to fail, destined to fail soon, and/or the machines that have been recalled because their batch number indicated a high failure rate. Catch the failures before you connect them to patients and you could save their lives.
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